Ideally, everyone would begin every InDesign document by carefully constructing all of its character, paragraph, and object styles. In reality, that’s rarely the case. Perhaps you pick up documents where a style-averse designer left off, or maybe your own files could use better organization. In either situation, DTP Tools’ Power Styles plug-in can help.
This $59 software, which is compatible with InDesign CS3 through CS5.5, has four main features:
1. It can look at unstyled text or objects in an InDesign layout, then generate and apply character, paragraph, and object styles.
2. It can compare styles and tell you how they differ.
3. It can solve potential problems caused by local italics, bold, and other text formatting overrides by removing the formatting you don’t want and leaving the rest as is.
4. It generates a list (or “report”) of all the characteristics of one or more styles; for example, the type size, font name, color, what style it’s based on, and so on.
Want to know more? David Blatner, who designed Power Styles along with the software company DTP Tools, has written a handy article that describes the plug-in in greater detail. You can also download the 14–day trial version of Power Styles from the DTP Tools website.
Note that the Power Styles plug-in is also available in Blatner Tools, a suite of 12 plug-ins that sells for $139.
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on July 28, 2011
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