Don’t waste your time repeating the same tedious steps to achieve the same things you do indesign all the time, as many users of indesign don’t realise the power can be, especially when expanded it through plugins and scripts. So for you today you will notice that I’ve put together a small collection of scripts and plugins to show you what else InDesign can do.

1. Adobe InDesign Calendar Wizard

The Adobe InDesign Calendar Wizard is a free, open source, javascript extension to Adobe InDesign which automatically adds calendars to an InDesign document. It’s designed to be very flexible in creating calendars, laying out the page, and adding common cell content in such a way that the user can take advantage of the InDesign’s features to easily sytlize it.

The calendar wizard is compatible with Adobe InDesign CS and above on both OSX and Windows platforms.

2. Place Multiple PDF Pages

Place Multiple PDF Pages will allows the user to choose a page range from the PDF being placed, the crop type to use when placing, the page in the InDesign document to start placing on (adding new pages as needed), where to place it on the page (upper right, centered, etc., and using an optional offset), and whether to scale the PDF to the existing page size.

If an InDesign doc isn’t open, it will read the size from the PDF and create a new InDesign document at the size of the PDF before placing the pages.

3. Multi-Find/Change

Multi-Find/Change (MFC) is a scripted plug-in for Adobe InDesign and InCopy (CS4/CS5.x/CS6) to manage and execute batches of saved Find/Change queries. MFC is the ideal tool for those who rely (or want to rely) on Find/Change queries to correct and/or format text.

4. EAN-13 Barcode and ISSN/ISBN Wizard

This script lets you create your barcodes without leaving InDesign. No special fonts are required. Besides EAN-13 barcodes, the script supports ISSN/ISBN (including the new 13-digit ISBN), and 2 and 5-digit EAN-13 Add Ons.

5. InGutter 2.0

This free script gives you a functionality that is sorely lacking in InDesign: it allows you to easily create and manage vertical rules within multi-columns text frames. This script is compatibility with InDesign CS4, CS5, CS5.5, CS6 and CC. (CS3 is no longer supported.)

6. Font Reporter

Do you need information about fonts used in your document(s)? Do you want to check is some fonts missing in a more than one file? You can do that with FontReporter®!
You can collect info from currently opened files, or even better, browse to folder that contains your InDesign files, and script will automatically loop through them, and collect all info.

Two reports can be generated. First is default, and you can’t turn it off, and that is complete list of fonts in all files together sorted and filtered duplicates. Second one is document based report, so you get report per file about fonts. And last option is to open created report (complete report) in default text editor.

7. FramedWeb

FramedWeb helps you convert web pages into editable InDesign layouts. It 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.  FramedWeb is work in progress – the current version is 0.0.9, and there are still many things on our ‘to-do’ list. However, in its present shape it is already quite useful, so we decided to make it available to the general public.

The price of version 1.0 will be US$79.00 per activation when it is released. But if you’re willing to give us some feedback, we’ll be selling the beta version for US$39.00 per activation.  You can try it out at no cost for 20 days, which should help you decide whether the current beta version can be useful for you.

8. Design Studio Font Catalog

This JavaScript for Adobe InDesign creates a font catalog of all the fonts in the InDesign font directory first System fonts and fonts from the user directory (under Apple OS X) are not considered.

All formatting can be controlled using character and paragraph formats. Choice of color and design are at the font sample book from Adobe. The type area is designed so that you can punch and file the pages.  In large font collections with over 1000 fonts and it may be that the script is running long. However, it does its job safely and reliably.

9. Convert All Text to Outlines

The Script is intended for Converts All Texts to Outlines. Each line of text becomes a polygon object. When the converted text is a single letter that has no internal spaces or detached parts, the polygon contains only a single path. Script Options: 1) “Move Created Objects to Layer” – if false, creates the outlines placed on top of the text on a layer of the facility, if true, drop-down list is chosen name of the new layer named “Converted Text” or the name of one of the existing layers for move created objects; 2) “Show Report” – display the report of converting text objects, contains the number of objects “Story” with overflow. Objects with over set text not converted, Cells of tables with overflow of contents are ignored.

10. Grid Calculator Pro Edition

Grid Calculator Pro Edition will create grid based layout in no-time, all settings are applied directly. Never again do you need to name layers, measure margins, setup the body copy to fit the layout or measure the x or H-height for applying image-lines that are used to align text and images with killer-precision for the most beautiful layout and typography.

Starting from version 3.0 it also handles your paragraph and character styles. Creating perfectly synchronized texts for your layout is a breeze and takes your text handling to a completely new level.

The plug-in can handle an unlimited number of styles and quickly sort them neatly in group folders in the different palettes. The plug-in is not required in order to open InDesign files created by the plug-in.