Review: Free Style Flocker Plug-In Brings True Stylesheets to InDesign

New plug-in brings back the concept of stylesheets and promises to replace three native InDesign palettes.

While younger design­ers may not rec­og­nize the dif­fer­ence between styles and stylesheets, old hands remem­ber the days when every lay­out had both. Styles are the re-usable record­ings of indi­vid­ual para­graph and char­ac­ter for­mat­ting attrib­ut­es we all use dai­ly in InDesign, QuarkXPress, Illustrator, and even Microsoft Word. Most recent­ly, InDesign CS2 added object styles–the abil­i­ty to apply non-text attrib­ut­es such as frame col­ors and insets, text wrap set­tings, drop shad­ows, and so on to any type of object, includ­ing text frames. Styles are applied one at a time, to a sin­gle object or pas­sage of text, at a time. For instance, a mag­a­zine fea­ture arti­cle must employ sep­a­rate para­graph styles for each of the arti­cle’s title, sub­ti­tle, kick­er, byline, first para­graph, body copy, cap­tions, sub­heads, pul­lquotes, jump lines, and so forth.

Stylesheets are col­lec­tions of styles. All of those styles that go into for­mat­ting a typ­i­cal arti­cle would be grouped togeth­er under a stylesheet that says, this is the com­plete def­i­n­i­tion of our mag­a­zine’s fea­ture arti­cles. Another stylesheet would hold the styles to be used on a depart­ment page, and oth­ers for the cov­er, the table of con­tents, an inbrief news sec­tion, and on and on until every sec­tion and page of the mag­a­zine had its own stylesheet con­tain­ing all the styles nec­es­sary to lay­out a com­plete issue to spec. In work­flows where that one mag­a­zine is not the only project cre­at­ed, all of the indi­vid­ual stylesheets would be grouped under a mas­ter stylesheet named after the pub­li­ca­tion. In this way, styles from dif­fer­ent projects are kept sep­a­rate, and pro­duc­tion artists aren’t left won­der­ing which “Body Copy” para­graph style is to be applied to the “Politics” page.

Way back when, stylesheets were print­ed on paper inside envelopes we called job jack­ets. When you were assigned to a project, you were hand­ed the job jack­et con­tain­ing the typ­i­cal out­put specs (deliv­er­able for­mat, trim size, required bleed, and so forth) and stylesheets that spelled out what styles you would employ. When lay­out went dig­i­tal, we lost a large mea­sure of con­trol that is only now begin­ning to re-emerge in the form of Job Definition Format (JDF), Digital Asset Management (DAM), and advanced flow con­trol sys­tems like the InDesign- and InCopy-based K4 or Quark’s Quark Publishing System. Despite the oth­er back to the future move­ments, stylesheets are still missing.

Figure 1: InDesign CS2’s Paragraph Style, Character Style, and Object Style palettes.

Yesterday (lit­er­al­ly), we were lim­it­ed to InDesign’s abil­i­ty to name styles what­ev­er you want­ed, then to base styles to each oth­er in a cas­cad­ing effect–Heading 3 (or “HC”) was based on Heading 2 (“HB”), which was based on Heading 1 (“HA”)–and, with a lit­tle InDesign mag­ic, all of those for­mats could be applied in order. Still, the three styles palettes–Paragraph, Character, and Object–often became long, unweild­ly lists of style names (see Figure 1). Should the “LT HA” style be applied to the “Letter from the Editor” page, or the “Letters to the Editor” page? Knowing which style to use often involved ref­er­enc­ing a print­ed key that explained the short­hand. Talk about error-prone and inefficient!

Today (lit­er­al­ly), we have a return to actu­al stylesheets in the form of a free plug-in from RogueSheep, Style Flocker.

Style Grouping = Stylesheets

Figure 2: The Style Flocker palette doc­u­ment styles orga­nized into basic stylesheets.

RogueSheep does­n’t actu­al­ly use the word stylesheet, but that’s what Style Flocker does: It groups styles togeth­er to enable the use of true stylesheets. In the sin­gle Style Flocker palette (see Figure 2) all of a doc­u­men­t’s para­graph, char­ac­ter, and object styles may be placed into “flocks” or groups, to cre­ate log­i­cal group­ing of relat­ed styles.

Continuing with the mag­a­zine exam­ple, all the required para­graph styles for a fea­ture arti­cle can be placed into a “Feature” group. But not just the para­graph styles. Character styles, such as those typ­i­cal­ly cre­at­ed for ital­ic or small­cap text, var­i­ous under­lines, fig­ure ref­er­ences, drop­caps, and list bul­let and num­ber char­ac­ters may be placed in the “Feature” group to keep them sep­a­rate and dis­tin­guis­able from sim­i­lar styles cre­at­ed for oth­er sec­tions of the mag­a­zine. The one Style Flocker palette group can even hold need­ed object styles cre­at­ed for illos (illus­tra­tions), call­outs, tables, anchored objects, side­bars, cap­tion text frames, and the fea­ture arti­cle’s main text frame with options such as num­ber of columns and inset variables.

InDesign scat­ters these three types of styles through­out their respec­tive palettes, which is a pro­gram­mer’s way of orga­niz­ing, sep­a­rat­ing kinds of objects. Style Flocker orga­nizes styles to fit the way design­ers work by bring­ing all the styles togeth­er into one list. Designers must rec­og­nize and care about the dif­fer­ences between, say, a para­graph style and object style, but what types of objects they style is not as impor­tant to a design­er or pro­duc­tion artist as what por­tion of the con­tent they will for­mat and when. By putting all three kinds of style def­i­n­i­tions into user-definable groups, Style Flocker enables cre­atives to final­ly orga­nize their styles accord­ing to project, sec­tion, page, or area of con­tent. And, because styles on the palette retain their unique iden­ti­fy­ing icons, design­ers can still instant­ly dis­cern a para­graph style from a char­ac­ter or object style, retain­ing that sec­ondary, but still impor­tant, lev­el of organization.

Even bet­ter, flocks are nestable. One flock may con­tain anoth­er, which con­tains two oth­ers, each of which hav­ing their own sub-groups, and so on.

Next: The Good