Sooner or later you’re going to be asked to explain yourself. And if not yourself, your styles. Often, people need to explain or describe their paragraph and character styles to a colleague, a boss, or a client. What font did you use for this heading? What first line indent did you use for this body text?
There are a couple of scripts available to do this in limited ways, but so many people have asked about this being added as an actual feature inside InDesign that I decided to include it in the Power Styles plug-in, inside the Blatner Tools suite.
Since it’s a bit hidden (it lives inside the Paragraph or Character Styles panel menu), I’ve decided to bring it out in the open and show you what it looks like and what it does in this little movie:
You can download a free 2-week demo version of the Blatner Tools suite. (Remember that it works with CS3, CS4, and CS5.) And I’m pleased to note that the folks at DTP Tools have agreed to extend the special $99 deal until mid February!
I hope you find this feature useful!
This article was last modified on December 20, 2021
This article was first published on January 9, 2011
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Hi! Is there an alternate, updated tool that can do style markup that is supported in CC 2019? We have been using the Slendro plug-in, but are having technical issues that cannot seem to be resolved by their customer service.
Hi David,
This is a beautiful plug-in. Thanks so much.
Shawn
Hi David,
thanks for this tip/tool!
Just recently I spent hours of creating an overview for a client, so he knows which styles are related and so on. I first wanted to add the information about the font, size, etc. but I skipped because it would have taken forever.
That?s definitively another good reason for Blatner Tools.
Jeldrik
Another excellent plug-in is Slendro StyleReporter (available for ID CS2 through CS5), which generates an exhaustive list of every aspect of a character and paragraph style in spreadsheet format. There’s also an option to generate a less comprehensive listing as an InDesign file. StyleReporter also lets you generate a paragraph style and a character style layer within your file that contain tag boxes to mark each character and paragraph style. These save an enormous amount of time if you’re designing a publication interior and have to provide a visual reference of your tags in action, in addition to listings of the styles.
Now, if these plug-ins would only include Object, Cell, and Table styles, that would be pretty cool, too!
There is also great script to collect all used fonts in multiple documents. More info here: FontReporter®
Thanks.
Marijan.
very cool feature, thanks! I imagine I’ll need this at some point.