Birds Of A Feather Easily Selectable With New Rorohiko InD CS2/CS3 Plugin

In the world of InDesign plu­g­ins, New Zealand’s Rorohiko occu­pies an inter­est­ing niche; they come up with bril­liant lit­tle script­ed plu­g­ins for InD that put the smack-down on tasks that you did­n’t know you need­ed help with but don’t want to live with­out, such as a free­bie plu­g­in that gen­er­ates Sudoku puz­zles, one that allows you to snap frames right back to where you had them after mov­ing them aside to do some­thing (Lightning Brain StoryParker), one that allows you to make a thumb­nail gallery of graph­ics in a palette/panel (Image Library Loader), and more. A great many of these lit­tle good­ies are free, as well.

Rorohiko’s newest brain­storm is the Lightning Brain LikeFindsLike plu­g­in. The idea is to save us a step on some­thing we’re pret­ty sure just about every lay­out artist has to do every now and again; col­lect­ing a bunch of sim­i­lar objects (pic­ture or text frames, for exam­ple) for group­ing or for putting on a sep­a­rate lay­er, or what have you. LikeFindsLike only requires the lay­out artist to select on exam­ple of the frame they’re want­i­ng to select out, and from a new con­tex­tu­al menu item, the plu­g­in casts its net wide, instant­ly col­lect­ing every frame that it’s like. 

That may be all it does, but the alternative–holding down the Command (on our Mac) key and click-click-clicking–is kind of tedious and a poten­tial source of irri­tat­ing error. LikeFindsLike smooths out this admit­ted­ly minor–but poten­tial­ly infuriating–productivity speedbump

Obtaining, Installing, and Using

Getting the plu­g­in is simple–just go to the Rorohiko home page, go to the plu­g­ins sec­tion, and down­load “Lightning Brain LikeFindsLike”. 

All Rorohiko script­ed plu­g­ins require the pres­ence of what they call the “Active Page item Runtime” plu­g­in to work. This too is free; it is includ­ed with some of the free­bie down­loads or can be obtained as a sep­a­rate plu­g­in download.

Installation is rather sim­ple. If start­ing from zero, unpack the Active Page Item Runtime and drop it into the InDesign plu­g­ins fold­er, then unpack the LikeFindsLike plu­g­in and do the same. Restart InDesign. The new plu­g­ins will be access­able from a new con­tex­tu­al “API” menu item, and the Menu Bar will also have a new “API” pulldown. 

Usage is sim­i­lar­ly sim­ple. Select any frame (assum­ing its one you have more than one exam­ple of). Right- (or control-) click, mouse over “API” in the con­tex­tu­al menu, and select “Select All Similar…” from that API menu. Just like that, your frames are select­ed and you can do with them what you will.

And the price is right…it’s a freebie

To tune into the Rorohiko wave­length, go to http://​www​.roro​hiko​.com and pre­pare to be amazed.