LayoutZone CS4 Now Available (with added features)

I’m pleased to announce that the Layout Zone “feature”* is now available for CS4 users at the Automatication site! If you haven’t seen LayoutZone** before, you need to. It is clearly one of the top 10 “freebies”* that any InDesign user should have.

Here’s the blog post where we first described its functionality, but Layout Zone now does even more. But now in the CS4 version, besides letting you export any selection or page to a separate INDD file (and then, optionally, import that INDD file, replacing the original objects), Layout Zone can now export as PDF, SWF, IDML, or XFL. That means you can grab just a few objects and say, “I need an XFL of these, please.” Cool!

*Why did I put “feature” and “freebie” in quotes? I say “feature” because Layout Zone is technically a script, but after you install it and relaunch InDesign, it appears as a “feature” in the Edit menu. No Script panel involved. Very clean and easy. I say “freebie” because there is a big honkin’ Donate button on his site. That’s a clue. Yes, LayoutZone is free. But please (!) click that donate button if you find this script useful! Martinho has done a huge amount of work on this; he deserves whatever dollars, euros, rupees, pounds, or whatever you can send to him.

**Note that Martinho’s site seems to be inconsistent as to whether it’s called LayoutZone (no space) or Layout Zone (with a space), so I’ve decided to be inconsistent about it, too.

Martin says:

April 9, 2009 at 7:46 am

Yea! I was looking forward for this release. Thanks for posting…
(I going to search this donate button)
EDIT (one minute later): wasn’t hard to find :)

James Fritz says:

April 9, 2009 at 8:12 am

Greatest Script Ever.

liviu says:

April 10, 2009 at 3:55 am

Donate? Adobe should buy his work… Quark is making lots of money praising this feature of xpress… (Which I never got to use because it doesn’t give you full control, like this script does…)
Starting from this we can think of many useful other uses…: when creating business cards (n-up like in corel) you could have one card editable and the others automatically placed (if possible) or at least automatically exported in one file and updated in the original file as “smart duplicates”…

Martinho da Gloria says:

April 14, 2009 at 1:53 am

Indeed I have been inconsistent about the way I spell LayoutZone.
Thanks David to support my inconsistency :)
Martin ho

Sheri says:

July 7, 2009 at 2:37 pm

I am using the CS3 version of this script. I now have INDD files embedded within INDD files, which are embedded within INDD files. It seems this is a bad idea, because now I have corrupt links (every time I print out, the wrong linked file gets printed, and I have to re-link it again). Has anyone seen this problem and is there anything I can do about it?

Thanks!

David Blatner says:

July 7, 2009 at 3:34 pm

@Sheri: Hm. What does “wrong linked file” mean? What gets printed? I haven’t had the problem you describe. Are the Linked INDD files up to date (in the Links panel)?

July 8, 2009 at 9:16 am

Yes, the linked files are up to date. What gets printed is another file in the same folder, as if it is pointing to the wrong file. Then I have to re-link it (to the same file) to get it right again.

July 9, 2009 at 7:10 am

I downloaded a trial of CS4 and the problem is gone! Thank goodness, it was driving me crazy. Looks like it’s upgrade time for me.

Paul says:

January 10, 2010 at 2:43 pm

Hi
Does anyone know how to export objects to a .indd file? in the cs3 version it was clear, but I don’t understand how to do it with the cs4 version of this amazing script
Thanks!

January 10, 2010 at 2:46 pm

Well, my bad. the ‘assign zone’ option exports to .indd.. Thanks anyway!