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

The Bad

Style Flocker does­n’t sup­port InCopy, so edi­to­r­i­al per­son­nel, arguably those in great­est need of stylesheets and style orga­ni­za­tion, are stuck with the same old style palettes. This is sur­pris­ing giv­en that RogueSheep is com­prised almost entire­ly of for­mer Adobe InDesign and InCopy devel­op­ers. Fortunately, because the Style Flocker palette only ref­er­ences styles rather than con­tain­ing its own, doc­u­ments that employ it are still ful­ly use­able in InCopy. We did­n’t even see the miss­ing plug-in alert upon open­ing either assign­ments or the .INDD file itself in InCopy CS2.

While the total lack of InCopy sup­port is dis­ap­point­ing, there’s anoth­er glar­ing omis­sion in Style Flocker: You can’t cre­ate or edit styles with it.

RogueSheep claims that Style Flocker can replace InDesign’s Paragraph, Character, and Object Styles palettes. While that’s true in cas­es where the stylesheets are fixed and no new styles need be cre­at­ed, it does­n’t hold water while cre­at­ing or edit­ing styles. Style Flocker will allow unfet­tered orga­ni­za­tion­al free­dom and typ­i­cal one-click appli­ca­tion of styles, but to edit those styles or cre­ate new ones, you have to either go back to InDesign’s style palettes or use the even less con­ve­nient Style Options com­mand from the Control Palette’s fly­out menu. Double-clicking the style in the Style Flocker palette does nothing.

So, you can’t real­ly replace any palettes with Style Flocker, but you can reclaim some screen real estate. With Style Flocker han­dling your style appli­ca­tion and orga­ni­za­tion, you can group togeth­er (tab) the indi­vid­ual Paragraph, Character, and Object Styles palettes or even reduce their heights to a min­i­mum. It isn’t few­er palettes, per se, but you aren’t required to give them as much space now.

Here’s a tip: Create mul­ti­ple work­spaces, one to employ when cre­at­ing or edit­ing styles and includes Style Flocker and the three style palettes, and anoth­er work­space for work­ing with a fixed stylesheet, hid­ing InDesign’s styles palettes.

On the palete fly­out menu is a Show Palette for Style Drag sub­menu, which you’ll like­ly nev­er use. The menu opens any of InDesign’s own styles palettes, but it’s even less con­ve­nient than going to the Window menu. Moreover, InDesign work is style-intensive–you need to be able to cre­ate and edit styles on the fly. I pre­dict you’ll find your­self ignor­ing the Show Palette for Style Drag menu and sim­ply leav­ing the oth­er palettes on screen somewhere.

Style Flocker also will not update itself to reflect new­ly cre­at­ed styles. They have to be man­u­al­ly added to the palette from the Add fly­out menus or by drag­ging and drop­ping from InDesign’s styles palettes.

The Ugly

We dis­cov­ered one bug while using Style Flocker on Windows. Resizing the width of the palette unde­sire­ably alters its height pro­por­tion­ate­ly, as if the cor­ner were being dragged instead of just the side. This hap­pened with­in InDesign CS2 run­ning on Windows XP Pro SP2 on two dif­fer­ent test sys­tems. Fortunately, it did not occur on any of our Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4 systems.

Truly, this bug is as minor and incon­se­quen­tial as it can be and still qual­i­fy for being called ugly. If you expe­ri­ence this behav­ior, set your width, then drag the bot­tom edge of the palette to set its height. The bug only occurs when drag­ging the side bor­ders, not the top and bottom.

InDesign’s Workspaces do record and apply posi­tion­ing and siz­ing to the Style Flocker palette, so update your usu­al workspace(s) after arrang­ing this palette.

Wishlist

Naturally, I’d like to see Style Flocker updat­ed to incor­po­rate InCopy sup­port, but there are some oth­er fea­tures it should also have:

• The abil­i­ty to cre­ate styles. Like native style palettes, this should be a call to the New Style dia­log depend­ing on which of the three new style but­tons a user clicks on. Newly cre­at­ed styles should be added to the cor­rect area of InDesign (i.e. the respec­tive native palette), and a ref­er­ence instant­ly gen­er­at­ed in Style Flocker.
• Similarly, the abil­i­ty to edit styles is crucial.
• Being able to print out the con­tents of Style Flocker would be use­ful in build­ing a print­ed style guide, but, even more use­ful would be…
• Making Style Flocker’s palette con­tents an exportable XML file that can be shared with oth­er Style Flocker users across the work­group (inde­pen­dent of doc­u­ments), and import­ed as page con­tent into, say, an InDesign lay­out to be used as the basis for build­ing a style guide man­u­al (print­ed or PDF).
• Ideally, Style Flocker would give the user the option of not only export­ing or print­ing the list of flocks and style names and types, but also the actu­al style def­i­n­i­tions them­selves, pulling data from the style def­i­n­i­tion summary.
• Color cod­ing of flocks.
• Import flocks from anoth­er doc­u­ment for rapid back­wards, uh, flock­ing. Even with an XML export, import­ing flocks would have a ben­e­fit to productivity.
• A MRU (Most Recently Used) list of styles sim­i­lar to Microsoft Word’s Styles palette. Flocks are extreme­ly con­ve­nient, but it would ben­e­fit design­ers of long, many-styled doc­u­ments to have a quick list of their last 5–10 styles sep­a­rate from the flocks lists.
• A “Sort Alphabetically” tog­gle to tem­porar­i­ly impose a Quick Apply-like UI onto Style Flocker (effec­tive­ly, Quick Apply inclu­sive of Object Styles).
• Replace Quick Apply entire­ly by adding a key­board short­cut to take focus into the Style Flocker palette, key­board arrow or let­ter nav­i­ga­tion to desired styles, and Enter/Return appli­ca­tion of the high­light­ed style.

The Final Word

This kind of style uni­fi­ca­tion and orga­ni­za­tion is over­due, and we should have seen it first from Adobe–just like lay­er sets, a History palette, and some oth­er remark­ably use­ful things you’ll see plug-in devel­op­ers adding to InDesign over the next few months.

Despite the bad and the ugly, Style Flocker is a true must-have plug-in for any­one who works with more than a hand­ful of styles. In fact, this review would have been pub­lished ear­li­er in the day if I had­n’t been on the phone telling my clients and friends to go down­load Style Flocker. It’s already deployed across every sys­tem in my studio.

Style Flocker is so use­ful that, to be can­did, I’m sur­prised RogueSheep is giv­ing it away free. I would have hap­pi­ly paid $14.99-$19.99 for it. (Shh! Don’t tell RogueSheep!) I sug­gest you go get it before Jeff Argast and com­pa­ny wise up and slap a price tag on this one.

Style Flocker 1.0 is avail­able as of today for InDesign CS and InDesign CS2 for Windows or Mac OS X, and is a free down­load for all. For more about RogueSheep’s prod­ucts, read the Quark VS InDesign​.com’s reviews, or vis­it RogueSheep directly.