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

The Good

Having expe­ri­ence with lay­er groups using DTP Tools improved Layers palette for InDesign and InCopy or Photoshop’s and Illustrator’s native lay­er sets will make Style Flocker almost instant­ly usable. Even with­out the pri­or famil­iar­i­ty to the con­cept, it’s an easy learn.

After a fast and easy instal­la­tion, Style Flocker pops up auto­mat­i­cal­ly with InDesign. Initially, with no doc­u­ments opened, Style Flocker will show only InDesign’s six default styles–“Basic Paragraph,” “No Paragraph Style,” “Basic Graphics Frame,” “Basic Text Frame,” and two “None” styles, one each from the Character and Object styles palettes. These auto­mat­i­cal­ly appear in an “InDesign Defined Styles” flock (aka group). Opening a pre-created doc­u­ment that has its own style def­i­n­i­tions will add those into the palette under “User Defined Styles.”

At the bot­tom of the palette, beside the clev­er­ly placed RogueSheep logo, is the stan­dard icon New but­ton. Clicking the New but­ton will cre­ate a new flock. Name it inline, then pro­ceed to drag styles from either the “InDesign Defined Styles” or “User Defined Styles” groups (twirl down the expan­sion arrow if nec­es­sary). To cre­at­ed nest­ed flocks, sim­ply drag one flock and drop it atop another.

Just like in Photoshop or Illustrator, these groups can be renamed inline by double-clicking on the name, or by choos­ing the Rename Flock com­mand from the palet­te’s fly­out menu. Flocks can be delet­ed by drag­ging them to the equal­ly famil­iar trash can at the bot­tom of the palette or with the Remove Flock com­mand, also on the palette fly­out menu.

Make a mis­take? No prob­lem: Like every­thing else in InDesign, actions on the StyleFlock palette are undoable with CMD+Z (CTRL+Z on Windows).

Figure 3: With a style select­ed, the grey remove but­ton appears.

When click­ing on a style, a grey cir­cle with an X inside appears to the right, as you can see in Figure three. Clicking the X will remove the style from the Style Flocker palette, but not from the doc­u­ment. This is very handy for reduc­ing the clut­ter of InDesign’s default and undelete­able styles such as “Basic Paragraph” or “None”. Accidentally unflocked styles remain on their respec­tive native palettes, and can be re-flocked with the palette menu’s Add sub­menus (see Figure 4). Three in all, these sub­menus pro­vide live list­ings of the con­tents of the Paragraph, Character, and Object Styles palettes; one click adds the style into Style Flocker with­out the need to go through a messy import dia­log. If even that isn’t con­ve­nient enough for you, you can drag styles direct­ly from the native InDesign palettes into Style Flocker–even mul­ti­ple styles all at once!

Figure 4: Style Flocker’s palette fly­out menu and Add Paragraph Style submenu.

To apply styles, sim­ply select text or objects as usu­al, and click on a style entry in Style Flocker.

All the styles, of any type, applied to the cur­rent­ly select­ed item are list­ed in the palet­te’s sta­tus area at the top. You can see at a glance which para­graph, char­ac­ter, and object styles are applied to the select­ed text and/or object with­out hav­ing to look through–and pos­si­bly scroll within–multiple palettes or tab between the Paragraph and Character Styles palettes.

(On a side note: It has always bugged me to no end that InDesign’s default work­space has those two palettes grouped and tabbed so they can’t be seen and used simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. The very first thing I do when set­ting up a new InDesign work­space is to stack Paragraph Styles above Character Styles. While there are always excep­tions, I ask you: Who does­n’t most often use para­graph styles while employ­ing char­ac­ter styles?)

Styles can even appear in mul­ti­ple flocks simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. Say, for exam­ple, the “Subhead” para­graph style is iden­ti­cal across a pro­jec­t’s mul­ti­ple sec­tions. Drag the “Subhead” style from the Paragraph Styles palette and drop it into all of the sec­tion flocks. The style itself won’t be duplicated–changing the actu­al style on the Paragraph Styles palette still changes all instances through­out the document–it’s just the ref­er­ences to it that are replicated.

And, this brings us to Style Flocker’s limitations.