Print Out Style Sheet Specs
Have you ever needed to have some sort of detailed report listing all the Paragraph and Character styles in an InDesign layout file, including their settings? Something like this?
You could ask the intern to do it, but it’s better that you leave their time free for valuable tasks like making Starbucks runs. Instead, the next time you need some sort of documentation for how a layout’s styles are set up, download Dave Saunders’ cross-platform shareware script, TextStylesReporterCS2, for InDesign CS2 (and CS3 … keep reading).
Click that link to download the .zip file, then un-zip it and read the ReadMe for what needs to go into your Scripts folder.
After you install it, all you have to do is open the source layout and double-click the script in your Scripts panel (from the Window > Automation submenu in InDesign CS3). It creates a nicely formatted report—in as much or as little detail as you want—faster than any human being could, let alone an intern.
Before it makes the report, the script puts up a dialog box that lets you choose exactly which attributes of the styles should be included. Take a look (click to enlarge):
See that menu at the bottom I’m pressing on? The Sort Order of Report menu lets you change the style listing order from the default Alphabetic to “Based On.” That is SO helpful when you’re wrestling with someone’s Byzantine style hierarchies, trying to figure out who’s leaning on who.
Since he created this thing of beauty back in 2006, Dave Saunders moved on to other tasks (he stopped development/support for it, but said it was okay to post about it when I asked), so officially it’s a CS2-only script. But if you use the “Version 4.0 Scripts” folder trick that David wrote up in a blog post last year, TextStylesReporter will work just fine in InDesign CS3. (How do you think I got these screen shots?)
David’s post: Using Old Scripts in CS3
TextStylesReporter.jsx is shareware, meaning it’s fully enabled at no cost. But — assuming it works and is valuable for you — in the .zip file that you download, please open the ReadMe.pdf to find the link to donate a shareware fee to Dave. Give till it hurts! Seriously, we must support our friendly, generous community of amazing InDesign scripters as much as we can. Fame and adulation don’t pay the mortgage. 
“Have you ever needed to have some sort of detailed report listing all the Paragraph and Character styles in an InDesign layout file, including their settings?”
No. Never. Not once. And I never will.
I need that very often, to understand the mess usually non pro ID users installed in the documents I need to work on.
I used this script once when I was looking for certain fonts used in style sheets. It was much easier to do a find in the document this script created than it would have been to edit each style sheet looking for a font.
I use that very script, recommended by the hosts a few months ago, to send the style sheets to our xml people who put all our publications into a searchable database. For some reason they need to have a breakdown of the styles, this is exactly what they look for.
Great script! I’d love to see one more added feature, which would be to include parent style group information, and to and sorting by style group as an option.
Has anyone seen a script to do this for all the files in a book?
Somebody like Klaus who must only use InDesign to do small projects can’t possibly understand the complicated style sheets needed for long books or periodicals. As a textbook designer, I spend many hours writing spec sheets for publishers. Some of these sheets get to be around 30-35 pages long, with very terse verbiage. A script like this could form the basis of a new way of compiling these sheets so I could spend less (unpleasant) time writing specs and more time designing book templates.
This script can’t solve everything, since it doesn’t (and logically can’t) include all the makeup parameters that need to be specified for a long document, but it might be a great base to work from. It looks like it would also be useful for troubleshooting style sheets and looking for improper parent/child style setups that invariably occur during the design phase. I look forward to trying it out.
Wow, is this timely info. I have needed this ability a little bit on many past occasions, and I need it big time right now.
I read InDesign Secrets but have gotten behind over the past week because of problems with a complex file that have stumped not only me but Adobe tech support. I have a deadline, and I need a style sheet as a baseline for figuring out a massive workaround. So I typed “InDesign print style sheet” into Google and here you are, right on top of it for me.
Thanks.
Which is putting it mildly.
Claire: “Somebody like Klaus who must only use InDesign to do small projects can’t possibly understand the complicated style sheets needed for long books or periodicals.”
Yes, I can. I do produce large documents with dozens of parent-child nested style sheets. I just find it so much more easy and efficient to look directly at the specs inside the Styles windows than skimming through heaps of printed paper pages.
Is there any script that will apply the paragraph/text style to the heading of the explanation to which the report is referring?
In other words, if I have a paragraph style called “Header 1,” can I apply Header 1 to the first line of it’s report explanation? At this point, I’m still applying styles manually.
Thanks for any feedback!
Got this email this morning
“Just to clarify earlier discussion with XXXX. Would it be possible to produce RTF files from InDesign for (a) BOOK NAME (Chapters 1,2 and
and (b) BOOK NAMET (Part 1). We can evaluate after that if it is a useful exercise to extract certain style info which is not present in XHTMl files. ”
Well I sent them the RTFs for the chapters, not sure what good it will do? But I also used the script to get the breakdown of the styles.
Can anyone tell me why they need RTFs and what info they could possibly extract that isn’t already in the InDesign file?
Maybe for significant third-party text edits made by someone without access to InDesign?
Or, maybe he just doesn’t want his indd file out and about.
???
Well they are my indd files and they asked for all the files. Which I gave them. This is an on-going problem with these guys, every year we have the same difficulties and the same conversation, somehow they do manage to get the job done though, their methods are bewildering though.
There aren’t too many tasks as boring as writing down all the specs of, like, 30 Para Styles. By the time I’m finished I can’t even read my own writing.
This script changes everything. Dave, honestly, you are the greatest! My goal for the next year? To learn scripting.
I need to print out styles specs (actually I wish they were able to be copied individually but they aren’t) and am working in CS4…I can’t find any info in CS4 help to tell me if they’ve added this feature. Does anyone know? And, does anyone know if I can download this “TextStylesReporterCS2″ and it will work in CS4?
Thank you very much,
Debbie
This is GREAT! I use this info all the time when creating Read-Me template files for my clients! This takes so much of the pain away so that I don’t have to go back and forth to the style sheets to figure out what to write out for the specs’.
I manage a 120+ page publication every quarter, and have been updating our INDD template for design and type styles over that last couple of quarters. Finding this gem of a script has made my task about 99.9% easier, and taken the human error factor out. (My handwriting also deteriorated considerably after scrawling out the character formats for the 25th time!) Worked fine in CS3.
Thanks, Dave, and INDD Secrets for posting it.
That’s wonderful, Laura! Maybe we should include this one in the “top 10 must-have scripts” list.
Hi Debbie,
I have installed the CS2 version and it works to generate a report, but not of the styles, only a generic ‘no Paragraph Style’.
So, if anyone is up on how to sort that so all of your developed style sheets are listed, that would be great.
Cheers,
Trisha
@Trisha: That’s odd. Not sure what went wrong.
Note that this was such a common request that we built the feature into the Blatner Tools suite of plug-ins. No, that’s not free, but it does even more than Dave’s free script.
It is odd, thanks for your response & the link David, is there an instruction somewhere I may have missed?
Have tested outputting reports whilst selecting different styles, to no avail. Just keep generating the report for the basic para.
Any ideas before I go elsewhere?
Thank you!