A Summer’s Bounty of New InDesign Add-ons

Anne-Marie Concepcion

5

One of the best things about being an InDesign user is having so many enticing scripts, plug-ins, and other add-ons to choose from. Many of our InDesignSecrets sponsors who develop such goodies recently announced some new tools that I can’t wait to try out! I’ll summarize their announcements below, but be sure to visit the product pages for more information and to download free trials.

iDML 1.0: an InDesign document text editor for iPad
from DTPTools, 15.99 EUR / $19.99 US

Unlike most iOS and InDesign related apps released these days, this app is not focused on consuming the content, but on creating it. iDML app can edit any documents in the InDesign markup format – ?idml?. It shows all stories within the document and allows to edit them. It also displays a list of fonts and styles used in the document. No layout changes are made to the document when edited in this app and no third party data is manipulated. This program can either be used by designers who need to modify text content without access to a computer or necessary Creative Suite applications, or by anyone who needs to review and edit text content of InDesign documents without having to buy InDesign or InCopy applications.

Annotations 1.0: Import PDF Comments to InDesign
from DTP Tools, 59 EUR / $79 US

The Annotations plug-in allows you to import notes and comments from PDF into a source InDesign file. For successful import of text edits and space dependent notes, both documents need to be identical. The plug-in can match different pagination of the PDF and InDesign documents, so you can export just a one page PDF for proof or import notes from a whole book PDF to a single chapter file.

DocsFlow 7 (beta 4): Google Docs/InDesign Workflow
from Em Software, free during beta testing

DocsFlow is a plug-in that links Google Docs to InDesign?you get an “Import from Google Docs” command in the File menu, and you can update changed Google Docs stories from the Links panel without losing formatting. David wrote about the first beta of this breakthrough plug-in back in June. What’s newsworthy lately is that it supports style mapping to InDesign styles, a missing feature that David mentioned.

Framed Web (beta v.06): Convert HTML to InDesign
from Rorohiko, $39 after 20-day free beta trial, $79 after release

FramedWeb helps you convert web pages into editable InDesign layouts, and works with Adobe InDesign CS3 and upwards. You can give FramedWeb a URL, and it will attempt to build a corresponding InDesign layout. You can also copy-paste HTML text into a text frame and then use FramedWeb to convert it to formatted text. In the latest beta, CSS styles are imported and converted into logical “based-on” paragraph and character styles, which makes them easy to edit. They’ve started work on an online manual if you want to learn more.

[Developers: Did I miss your recent InDesign plug-in/add-on announcement? Please let me know and I’ll update this post!  –AMC]