Free Layout Zone Add-on Is an Incredible Productivity Tool

David Blatner

3

Let’s say you’re working on a layout in InDesign but you need to get a colleague to design a piece of the spread—perhaps a coupon, or a sidebar, or an ad. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could just hand a piece of the layout to them?

You can, of course, import an INDD file just as easily as you can place a graphic, so your colleague can work in one InDesign document and you can then import their file into your layout. And for years, a free add-on from Martinho da Glória and his colleagues at Automatication, has made this process a hundred times easier and more efficient.

Layout Zone creates a series of commands that appear in the Edit menu, but no one would ever know that this feature is actually powered by a script. And, if we’re going to be precise: It’s actually two features, not one.

The first, Edit > Layout Zone > Assign Zone, converts a whole page or the selected objects on a page to an InDesign document for you (it asks you for a file name and a location to save it). The file it creates is exactly the same size as the objects.

But there’s potentially a problem: Sometimes text falls outside the text frame—for example, the descenders on the last line of a paragraph may stick out past the bottom of the frame. Fortunately, the Layout Zone scripts adjust for this, automatically creating a bleed area to fully accommodate the text. You can also create a bleed area around the selected objects to capture anything else that might be sticking out. For example, if you have a drop cap that is nudging past the left side of the frame, you’ll probably need to adjust the left bleed manually to accommodate that.

Anyway, once the Layout Zone feature creates the InDesign document, it places it back on your InDesign page, replacing the original objects. It’s uncanny.

If this were all it did (as the song goes), it would be enough! But no, Martinho went further. If you select a placed INDD, you can select the second option in the Layout Zone submenu: Convert Zone. This command actually converts any placed InDesign document back into editable objects in your document!

In fact, this works even if you’ve rotated, scaled, or skewed the placed InDesign document. In fact, let’s say you cropped the InDesign document so that not all of it is visible. You can choose Paste Into Selected Frame (in the Convert Zone dialog box above), and the original file’s individual objects become nested inside a frame so that they’re editable, but cropped in the same way as the placed INDD file was.

The Workflow, Summarized

So, back to the original premise: You’ve used Layout Zone to create a linked INDD file that replaces the original objects, and you’ve given the INDD file to the designer to make it pretty.

When they’re done, your linked INDD will be modified in the Links panel, and you can just click Update. Or you can select Edit > Layout Zone > Convert Zone to convert your designer’s work back into editable pieces in InDesign.

In my opinion, this script has been life-changing.

Other Goodies

Below the basic Layout Zone commands, you’ll find the extraordinarily convenient Export Selection menu, which offers individual submenu commands to export selected objects to a variety of file formats: Adobe PDF, Interactive PDF, InDesign Markup Language (IDML), PNG, and HTML, as well as the long-deprecated Flash formats (SWF and XFL).

Where to Get the Script

Martinho da Gloria has generously made this available to anyone. Just visit Automatication’s website to download it. (If you like Layout Zone, you can show your gratitude by clicking the Donate button.)

After you download it, unzip it, and put the LayoutZone folder loose in the Scripts folder (inside the InDesign application folder). Next time you relaunch InDesign, you’ll find the Layout Zone features in the Edit menu.

Note: The Automatication website officially lists compatibility with the 2020, 2021, and 2022 releases of InDesign, but we have not noticed problems in newer versions.

If you think this is amazing (as I do), and you’re looking for someone to do custom scripting, feel free to contact Martinho via his website.