PR: Rorohiko Releases BarredText Plug-In for InDesign
Wellington, 17-Jan-2011. Rorohiko Workflow Resources, a software development and consultancy company targeting the prepress and publishing area announces the immediate availability of version 1.0.5 of its ‘BarredText’ InDesign Plug-In. It is available to users of Adobe® InDesign® CS3, CS4 and CS5 on Mac OS X and Windows platforms.
The BarredText plug-in allows InDesign users to ‘mark’ text with a dynamic vertical bar in the margin, similar to a popular feature in Adobe FrameMaker®.
The features include:
- Anchor a vertical bar into the margin of selected text-range (for example, to visually mark edits to a text).
- Bar remains attached to text range when text range is moved around.
- Bar moves, expands or shrinks as needed when text is added to or removed from the marked text range.
- Bar auto-splits as necessary when text is flowing through multiple text frames.
- Easily tweak the visual appearance of any bars in a document through a named swatch and object style.
A fully functional, time-limited demo of the plug-in is available for download here.
Supported platforms: InDesign CS3, CS4 or CS5 on Mac OS X or Windows.
About Rorohiko Workflow Resources
Rorohiko Workflow Resources (“Slash the time it takes”) provides custom software development, consultancy and software developer training for companies operating in the prepress and publishing area. Rorohiko Ltd. is based in New Zealand, and provides services to customers all over the world.
Note that you can get a discount on any package of BarredText by using the discount code mentioned in this podcast’s show notes: https://creativepro.com/indesignsecrets-podcast-141.php
I was hoping to use this to create a line between columns but i cant see how…
hehe… This must be o bug, i dont know if it was intended like this… If you have a 2 column text frame it will create only one bar the size of the last column height, and you can center that between the columns. Wont work if you have 3 columns…
Yes, that is a good point, albastru22! This plug-in currently does not like multi-column text frames. Single-colum only for now! I’m sure Kris will work on it over time. But it’s a low-cost 1.0 solution for now.
ParagraphBorder plugin allows InDesign users mark paragraph with left/right/top/bottom lines and fill. All options are native paragraph attributes (new panel in “Paragraph Style” dialog).
@albastru22 — you might want to check out Indiscripts sites as a workable solution. They make a free JS called InGutter. I played around with it in CS3/CS4 but it doesn’t seem to indicate CS5 compatibility. They have some other cool scripts as well.
https://www.indiscripts.com/post/2009/09/introducing-indesign-column-rules
Although I like the idea of the ‘BarredText’ plug, I want to give a BIG thanks to strizh for the link to dtputils.com. Now that’s a *very* nice and, as far as I can tell, complete plug which works a treat even in demo! Yes, a bit pricey compared to Rorohiko’s offering, but it offers so much more (at the time of writing). Looks like my new best plug for InDesign. :)
Yes, it is sensational the product from dtputil, it is the most requested feature that adobe ignores every time a new release of indesign comes out. I like the functionality, I like how it works, I want to buy it but I am afraid of bugs. The description doesn’t say much, for example now when I export the document with some paragraph with borders it wont show the borders… I hope this is because it is the demo version…
> for example now when I export the document with
> some paragraph with borders it wont show the borders
> ? I hope this is because it is the demo version?
Yes. It is a demo limitation.
I tried the demo of the DTP Utils plugin, and the side rules work really well and behave as I’d expect them to. But I’m less happy with the top and bottom rules. They apply to each paragraph individually, whereas I’d like to be able to have a rule at the top of a group of paragraphs in the same style (or, even better, a group of paragraphs in different styles but the same options set in each style) and a rule at the bottom of the group, and none in the middle. Kind of like the way space before and space after span columns works. Any chance of adding this functionality?