InDesign has many features, but sometimes it lacks the exact single feature you need to make your layout great or to cut the production time of your documents. If you can’t find what you need — or you think we missed some great ones, feel free to drop a comment below.

See how to install a plugin here. We divided the list into sections for easy consultation. Click on one of the entries of the list to go directly to that section. StockSolo adds a panel within InDesign and also Photoshop and Illustrator that allows you to search for an image without having to leave the document you are working on. Read more about StockSolo and see this video to undestand how it works.

This is a cool one! MagicTints is an InDesign plugin that lets convert any number of images or photos into the same color palette inside the document. Its machine-learning-trained engine automatically applies the colour scheme from one image or illustration to any number of other images, preserving the original contrast and illumination, without the need for a LUT or external editing.

This InDesign plug-in automatically finds and corrects text problems, including text overset, short lines, unbalanced columns and more. It is an essential component of InDesign for anyone who does serious type composition. This is a plugin that comes to help you with controlling the word counts in your documents.

It has a real time panel, and the ability to export comprehensive reports. For professional typesetting, the InDesign built in Vertical Justification is essentially useless because the software distributes all the space evenly. This plugin improves the VJ feature with other very useful automations and controls. Active Tables allows you to sort tables and create formulas. The formulas are not limited to tables, so you can also have calculation results inside text. See also how linking your InDesign tables to Excel files can help you speed up the production of your files.

These are three plugins. These three plugins add a professional mathematic, scientific and financial equation editor to InDesign. This plugin dynamically numbers figures and tables, and makes it easy to create and update references to those figures and tables.

Bookalope uses AI to strip away all visual styles and cleans up the document automatically, and then exports a semantically structures document to InDesign.

This is an extension that gives you a very useful interface from which you can create and run a series of find-change operations. The plugin adds many feature to the variables already present in InDesign. You can personalise the setting to automate almost anything related to the headers of your document.

Its capabilities are so many that I invite you to follow the link below in case you are interested in having more information. The plugin enables you to edit both the InDesign story and the Google Docs document independently, without losing work on either side. The plugin enables you to edit both the InDesign story and the documents in Word or Excel independently, without losing work on either side.

When laying out documents with facing pages a simple edit might force you to change the layout in all the pages which have elements with a distinct position relative to the spine. Reflective Object automatically applies the changes to your InDesign document. Link to the plugin. This is a bundle with two plugins. It allows you to export selected layers into a document, import layers from documents including pagination changes , group layers into folders, record visibility and settings into Comps.

This is a suite of 12 plug-ins designed by David Blatner to help you speed up your work. The tools vary from styles automations, auto fractions, paging automation, and so on. It helps with being more precise and quick at applying changes and corrections to your files. This way a proofreader knows immediately where changes have been applied.

This plugin inserts into two text frames a time stamp and an automated log of file modifications to an InDesign document. The plugin gives InDesign an extra panel similar to the one known from Photoshop. With this tool you can redo and undo steps, and save different versions of your file. Regardless of how much you change your documents, you can always return to any state at any time. Link to the product. This lets you create patterns based on three core pattern templates: Crosses, Lines, and Scallops.

This plugin gives you a floating library-palette filled with images that are automatically retrieved from one or more folders. The palette shows the images stored in that folder, ready to be drag-dropped into your document.

TimeTracker automatically and privately captures your activity and produces a timesheet on demand. FlightCheck is a stand-alone application that checks files for printing quality. EasyCatalog is one of the most famous plugins for InDesign. It helps you with creating product catalogs automatically. You can create different templates for the catalog pages, and populate them from an external data source. This is actually a Win application — not a script — but it’s so helpful that I must mention it here.

You can use this Win app to repair corrupt InDesign files in some scenarios Here the original post in Russian. This plugin helps you with creating calendars in InDesign. Thanks to the options it gives and the use of InDesign styles Paragraphs, Cells, and Table Styles , you can entirely personalize the layout of the calendar. The script includes everything, and it comes with up to 20 different languages. BarcodeMaker creates barcodes into InDesign.

You can manually insert the code number, get the data from an Excel file, or connect the plugin to a database. The plugin supports over 50 types of barcode.

With this app for iOS, you can edit stories in InDesign and easily assign paragraph styles and characters styles. This is actually not a plugin, but our own Redokun. It can work well for freelance designers, and it can be adopted to scale by companies of all sizes with in-house translators around the globe. Learn more about Redokun , and try it for free for 14 days.

View our Privacy Policy for more information. Deny Accept. Get this article emailed to you. Download guide – No email required. Share this article:.

Download guide. Read by more than 10k people. Learn more. Great resources! More from the blog. Redokun is an InDesign translator and plugin built for teams of all sizes. Learn how to translate entire documents in just a few steps from an InDesign workflow expert. But that said, there are a few tools and tactics that can help in preparing the file for translation and automating the manual tasks. No items found. Hey, I’m Stefano. Every week I share a new InDesign tip.

An example:. Thank you! You’re in. Check your email! Something went wrong while submitting the form. Very helpful. Great resources. The easiest way to translate your documents. Free for 14 days. Start 14 Day Free Trial.

 
 

– Update adobe indesign cs4 plugins free

 
Lightning Brain ClipAThing. Figure 4.

 

InDesign plug-ins, free third-party plug-ins

 

And they love to make tons of really minor edits. So this plug-in makes the process easier and less error-prone. With WordsFlow, contributors can continue editing the source Word documents, and then WordsFlow smoothly merges those edits made to the external Word document into its linked and formatted counterpart in InDesign.

Figure 5. WordsFlow adds a submenu to the InDesign File menu. If you spring for the Pro version of WordsFlow, the flexibility goes both ways: You can push changes from an InDesign story back out to its source Word document, further simplifying the back and forth between contributors and editors. I used to send a PDF to my client, have her mark it up with PDF commenting, then spend a couple of hours deciphering her notes, scratch outs, word changes, and other tiny issues. Now, I send my client the exported Word file, and she makes all the minor changes.

When she sends it back to me, I relink it with WordsFlow. The two hours that I would have worked on the minor changes is done in about a minute. For example, you can specify whether the resulting InDesign document should use facing pages. Sometimes you need to perform a batch process , which is a fancy name for doing the same thing to a folder full of documents all at once.

Or, perhaps a client supplied you with small Word files and wants them all placed into the same InDesign document. Batch Convert Figure 6 may be the helping hand you need in those situations.

Figure 6. Batch Convert gives you a wide range of options. You can also use Batch Convert to run a script on a batch of InDesign documents without converting them. Another big timesaver is the ability of Batch Convert to upgrade batches of old InDesign documents to the latest version. Batch Convert is invaluable for any InDesign batch processing task. Use it to quickly export, convert, or package an entire folder of images at once, or to run a script on a batch of InDesign files.

At least a few times per year, my book documents freak out and I have to go back to using an earlier version of InDesign. This could very well be the most amazing InDesign script ever written.

Figure 7. IndyFont exports real OpenType fonts that can be used on any platform with any other software. It offers strong support for OpenType features, including ligatures and contextual alternates, and it lets you quickly design your fonts with such effects as skewing and scaling. By itself, InDesign does not import Google Docs, so DocsFlow necessarily adds the capability to connect to Google Docs in the cloud, which is significant on its own.

From this point, it works similar to WordsFlow. As your contributors continue to edit their Google Docs, you can merge changes into the layout without losing any formatting you applied in InDesign. With the Pro version of WordsFlow you get a two-way workflow that allows you to push text edits from InDesign back out to Google Docs, with minimal disruption to Google Docs formatting. I think DocsFlow is a miracle plug-in.

What a relief! Thank you! Calendars are a challenge to create by hand because of the way the days shift around every year. It might happen that the result of the script is not what you wanted, or that the script fails in some way. It is way better to save first, just in case. This is the list of the scripts we collected. We divided them into sections for easy consultation. Click on one of the entries of the list to go directly to that section.

You’ll find the link to the instructions of each script in its description at the link. Please read them before launching each script. It helps you install other scripts. So meta. You should download it if you plan to install a lot of scripts. Link to the script Look for the Download button under Script Installer.

It allows you to run a single script or a set of scripts on a single document or on a list of documents. Link to the script. With this script you can make the process of running any script instantaneous by assigning a keyboard shortcut to it. Link to script. Add scripts from a folder to the InDesign menu. Unfortunately the page containing the link is in German, but try and check it out with the browser’s translation! This page shows you how to collapse the entire script into one single Undo.

Remember to always save a copy of the original, in case anything goes wrong. This script allows you to get the top, outer, bottom and inner margins for the five most common canons of page construction.

The script adds or removes columns from a text-frame or the page if nothing is selected. It could be very useful if you assign it a shortcut. See here how to create your own InDesign shortcuts. InGutter creates lines between your columns. The lines resize automatically when you resize the text frame. Very helpful with newsletters and magazines!

It places a label on each frame showing its dimensions. The labels are placed in a specific layer, so that it’s easy to delete them. Unfortunately, the dimensions are only in inches, and if you need a different measurement system you have to change the code. With this script you can either create indentation guides, or create faux double columns.

In the first case you can choose between three measurements: gutter measurement, half-gutter measurement, and custom measurement. In the second case you can duplicate the number of columns in each page of your spread. The gutter will be respected. Using this, you can avoid any alterations on your original column guides. With this script you can resize a bunch of page items, while keeping their centers fixed.

This “AllesEntsperren” script allows you to unlock frames. It also allows you to preserve the locked state of anchored objects. You will find it in the alphabetical list of scripts linked. With this “AllesSperren” script you can lock all frames. More versatile than manual actions. With this “HilfslinienKopieren” script the selected guides are copied to the selected page.

With this “HilfslinienUmwandeln” script you can convert selected page guides to spread guides and vice versa. When no guides are selected, a dialogue is shown to confirm that all guides of the active spread are converted. This script helps with the paragraph border feature, it lets you to set up both paragraph shading and borders on the same paragraph. It creates threaded text frames starting from a multicolumn text frame.

It’s helpful when you need to make some columns wider than the others. SplitStory splits the text frames of the selected threaded text-frame into separate, unlinked text frames. Like the one above, this script allows you to split your story from the selected text frame to the end. This script allows you to remove all empty text frames on document or current spread. Also offers the option to remove empty pages when the document is selected as script scope. This script is for editing stickers in InDesign.

By sticker I mean very simple blocks, one-line text frames having some border and containing a title or just a few words. It can be used for simple diagrams, mind-maps, and family trees. With this “RahmenAttributeKopieren” script you can copy the attributes of a frame to another one. This “RahmenVerschieben” script allows you to move frames by a defined value. These scripts number the lines of your text by creating an anchored text frame at the start of each row.

I am talking plural because I actually found two alternatives. A free script created by in-tools. Link to the free script by in-tools. It replaces strings of full caps with small caps, and adds a Character Style to adapt the text to fine-tune the results. The script fits overset or underset text in an story into the text frames of that story, while minimising visible changes to the text design.

The script breaks apart text by many options by paragraphs, columns, words, etc. You can use it in order to quickly separate blocks of text that can be individually positioned.

It also comes with an undo feature. The script removes any hyphenation in the document and updates the paragraph styles except the Basic Paragraph Style. The script counts the number of text frames, paragraphs, words, characters and shows them in a panel. The script automatically prevents single words from being on their own line It adds GREPs to your paragraph styles – check this other post if you want to learn how.

Do you need to add a certain paragraph style to selected text, but don’t work with an extended keyboard? In this topic discussion you can find the script for you! This script will allow you to find and change paragraph style for “this paragraph and the one following it”.

You can easily apply the No Break feature to any span of text to fix all kinds of typographic problems. But sometimes, it might be very helpful to show where No Break had been applied. With this script you can do just that!

With this script you can replace placeholder text with images or icons and vice versa. The idea behind Swimmer is that a document might contain keywords that sometimes need to be replaced by graphic icons, and sometimes need to be reverted back to plain words. Easily insert any Unicode character code into text in InDesign. The script allows you to assign a keyboard shortcut to a sequence of one or more Unicode character codes.

This “RasterSchrift” script allows you to create “dotted” text. The characters are composed of circles, squares or stars. With or without a background and with or without highlights. For both options one can choose circles, squares or stars.

I’ve used this plugin many times and found it to be incredibly useful if you have large amounts of Quark files you want to work with in Adobe InDesign. In my case, Depending on the size of the job, it can pay for itself with one use. It’s very accurate in its conversion of your files – I rarely had to make any adjustments at all on converted files.

You’re in control of the look and feel of the generated puzzles — and the generator takes care of actually building them for you. Place and Scale. With Place and Scale, automatically scale placed bitmap images photographs up or down when placing to exactly match a preset output resolution. Color2Gray allows you to convert placed color bitmap images to grayscale without modifying the original color image. The gray image will only render on the black K plate. Sudoku Generator.

Sudoku Generator allows you to generate one or more unique new Sudoku puzzles in an InDesign document and to generate corresponding solution pages as well — ideal for automatically generating Sudoku books. The TextExporter scripted plug-in saves all stories of an InDesign document into a single output file.

Catalog Composer 4. XPublisha is a tool for variable data publishing and catalog publishing automation. This means you can flow thousands of records into hundreds of pages without working up a sweat. Fractions’N’Prices is a plug-in for InDesign that automates the formatting of fractions and prices in text on the page. It also allows you to remove all manual kerning applied between characters or to remove kerning from a kerning pair.

It allows you to search, retrieve, and archive assets from within InDesign over the web without a browser or a desktop application. With InDesign HTTP, you can readily manage all your digitized files — images, graphics, text, logos, documents, and web pages — enabling easy and timely enterprise-wide access and feeding efficiently into traditional and new media publishing channels.

Split Box is a revolutionary plug-in for InDesign that allows users to quickly split standard InDesign text and image boxes into works of art. Use simple pull-down menus for great-looking effects, or combine multiple effects. The SmartWriter plug-in analyzes your work while you are creating a document and automatically delivers related and supportive material to your screen for immediate use.

Silicon Connector lets you link directly from InDesign to assets on the web or a web-hosted DAM system, reducing the time spent on multiple steps required for file-based linking or WebDAV. Rather than move files around network file shares and re-link, or package up linked assets, a single drag-and-drop makes an enduring link accessible to the InDesign file from any Mac or PC with a web connection.

SoftCare K2 This Workgroup Publishing Solution combines the power and reliability of large systems with the special requirements of smaller sized publishing houses, creative agencies, or companies. Optimum InDesign and InCopy integration guarantees maximum speed and top-level professional publishing, with easy handling.

SoftCare Notes Manager 3. Editorial staff will communicate more efficiently using notes, as displaying and navigating notes is easier and faster. SoftCare Overset Manager 5. The SoftCare Overset Manager plug-in gives you complete control over text length and text overset, enabling you to count, display, edit, and print overset text.

SoftCare Overset Manager is the ideal tool for everybody dealing with text-intensive files on a regular basis. Simple, fast barcodes for Adobe InDesign. One simple palette lets you customize over 50 different barcodes any way you want. Creates vector based EPS files that you can embed into your document or link on disk.

Link data anywhere on an InDesign page, or merge data into a document and into tables too. DataLinker integrates with BarcodeMaker to let you mass produce barcodes. This free plug-in brings high quality PostScript patterns to InDesign.

Fill any frame with a pattern, then modify, tweak and reinvent each pattern into unlimited variations! You can also purchase an additional 13 patterns with our PatternPack plug-in. Spec Cubed Spec Cubed provides a simple, powerful way to visually analyze the contents of your InDesign documents. By analyzing over attributes, ranging from leading and tracking to drop shadow properties and effective raster resolution, Spec Cubed radically simplifies the creation of visual style guides and specification sheets.

Spec Cubed also facilitates visual preflighting of complex documents. Color Spec Cubed reduces errors and improves communication by visually annotating InDesign documents with color, font, and placed graphic usage information. Slug Cubed simplifies the design and maintenance of slugs, page elements that contain standardized information about a document’s contents and status.

It offers unparalleled freedom and simplicity in slug layout, unparalleled power in the breadth of automatically updating fields it supports, and unparalleled variety in its ability to prompt designers for values in a way that makes sense in the workflow. PlanSystem3 is a third-generation planning, process, and workflow management system with unparalleled enterprise-wide function integration capabilities and process management tools. In addition to its superb flat planning and automation tools, PlanSystem3 integrates InDesign and InCopy with popular databases in a cross-platform environment, along with the ability to manage intangibles and any type of file, such as a Microsoft Word document or Excel spreadsheet, and to connect to advertising and third-party systems like Fotoware, Mediabank, or Chuckwalla.

PlanSystem3 provides a unique collaborative workflow management solution for magazine publishers, book publishers, catalogers, retailers, and design firms. Sonar Bookends InDex Pro. Sonar Bookends InFnote 3. Sonar Bookends InSeq 3. Automatically number figures, tables, and any references in your text. Compatible with InDesign CS. Sonar Bookends InXref 3. Easily embed page references for tables, appendices, chapters, and figures.

It comes with XMPie uPlan for advanced database connectivity and business rules programming. Add-ons are available for image personalization with Photoshop and dynamic charting in InDesign. Output multipage documents as single pages with variable filenames and change the job name in the printer queue.

Just choose the documents, adjust the settings, and BatchOutput will do the rest for you. BatchOutput is ideal for printers, service providers, publishing houses, and ad agencies. InPreflight is a comprehensive quality-control and packaging solution for InDesign. It gathers extensive information about document fonts, colors, and links and lets you instantly locate problems according to user-defined settings.

Get info on link attributes unavailable in InDesign, select various attributes to be flagged as problems, generate a preflight report, and more. A powerful packaging engine allows you to preflight and package multiple documents into a single folder or separately.

LinkOptimizer reduces the size of images linked to an InDesign document by eliminating excessive image data. Save storage space, time, and production costs; increase printing speed; speed up job transfer; and more. Various options are file size, bounding box, and color model. StyleReporter places style labels for each story in an InDesign document. It can label paragraph styles and character styles.

All labels are put on separate layer and a character style is assigned to the labels so that users can customize labels according to their needs. It also provides the capability to search for pictures and then drag-and-drop those pictures onto the layout.

Slendro SearchLinks helps users search for placed, for-position-only images uploaded to Xinet WebNative servers, once they configure SearchLinks to work with a Xinet WebNative database. The typical search turnaround time is two to three seconds. Users can then drag-and-drop results directly into their layouts.

Access in-depth image information such as the link name, state, file size, page number, picture type raster or vector , image format, image actual PPI, image effective PPI, image color space, image size, and linked file modification date directly from an image placed in an InDesign layout. This includes the ability to generate picture usage reports. The report can also be imported into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to access additional formatting options.

Buy now. Plug-ins Search. Adobe InDesign User Guide. Select an article: Select an article:. Applies to: Adobe InDesign. Third-party plug-ins for InDesign. Go more in depth: InDesign custom solutions InDesign automation.

InDitect is available in more than 30 languages. ANYGRAAF USA Visit our partner Doris32 Doris32 asset management and publishing production system offers multichannel publishing for print and electronic media and brings together stories, images, graphics, and ads into a common publishing production system with tools that integrate InDesign based pagination; asset management; image management; Internet, wireless, and electronic paper publishing; archiving; ad management; and production planning and tracking.

Cropmarks 2. Comdus Solution Visit our partner TradingBell InCat TradingBell Catalog Management System enables catalogers to aggregate product information and categorize, manage, and automate the publishing of product catalogs to print, the web, CD, and electronic marketplaces. Directory Resources Corporation Visit our partner Bookman This company offers several InDesign enhancements to automate the pagination of a Yellow Pages telephone directory.

Page Control 1. Create landscape and portrait pages in the same document. Resize master pages. Automatic resizing of pages according to master page. Custom pasteboard sizes. Print or export to PDF retaining page sizes. Layer Comps Layer Comps are a convenient way to store a snapshot of certain key aspects of your documents layers.