Local Resources


Popular Plug-ins

I can't speak for all the plug-ins available on the market, but there are a few that I either have used or have clients using. These come highly recommended:

  • Woodwing Software Provides some valuable plug-ins for InDesign. Its Smart Series of plug-ins is handy, and you can download free 30-day trial versions of its products. Smart Styles, as an example, allows you to store table styles (much like paragraph, character, and object styles) so that, once you develop some tables that work well with your company brand, you can simply define them as styles and tag all your tables in the same way. This is an enormous time-saver, not to mention great for content consistency. Check out Woodwing's website at www.woodwing.com.

  • Given the trend in advertising toward personalization rather than mass marketing, it's noteworthy to include variable data publishing. Several developers in this market space are creating plug-ins for InDesign so that marketing and communication professionals can take customer data and merge this with InDesign layouts to create personal marketing pieces. This goes beyond the simple DataMerge feature found in InDesign CS2. One of the notable applications is XMPie's product UDirect. For more information on this plug-in and other developers, go to Adobe's Variable Data Publishing Resource Center at http://www.adobe.com/products/vdp/main.html.

  • Cacidi Systems This company has a plug-in that batch processes multiple Quark and PageMaker files into InDesign fairly quickly and efficiently. Cacidi also offers several plug-ins for catalog publishers. Go to www.cacidi.com.

  • Adobe You can visit Adobe's website (www.adobe.com) for a listing of plugins for InDesign at http://www.adobe.com/products/plugins/indesign/main.html. The Adobe User Group website (http://www.indesignusergroup.com/thirdparty/plug_ins/_plug_ins.php) has a nice listing as well.

Note

All the plug-ins previously mentioned range in price from $65 to $2,500. As with all plug-ins, it is important that you verify with the developer that the plug-in you are interested in is compatible with the new version of InDesign. If a trial download is available, you should try the product to determine whether you might experience technical difficulties.




Adobe InDesign CS2 @work. Projects You Can Use on the Job
Adobe InDesign CS2 @work: Projects You Can Use on the Job
ISBN: 067232802X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 148

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