InReview: Style Utilities

Here’s the situation: You’re at the end of a long production project when a designer or a client calls with a “simple” request. They just want to tweak “one little last thing.” And to them it is simple, right? Yeah, for them. You, on the other hand, now have to create new styles and then manually go through every page and apply those styles throughout the document, one paragraph at a time. If you’ve worked in production, you’ve likely encountered this scenario. I know I have. Thankfully, Gabe Harbs (affectionately known by almost everyone as “Harbs”) has created Style Utilities as a relatively inexpensive offering by In-Tools.com. Product: Style Utilities Company: In-Tools Website: in-tools.com Price: US$39 Support: Mac and Windows, CS4 and later Rating: 4 stars This is not a snazzy or fancy plug-in. But it doesn’t need to be. It is a quiet, competent backstage player that subtly propels the success of the entire show. It doesn’t do anything until you’re ready, but once you click each OK button, it quickly restyles paragraphs of text in a variety of ways that will automate your production and save you time and frustration. This $39 plug-in package gives you eight functions, any one of which would itself pay for the whole shebang in time-savings after just a few uses. If you routinely do production where styles change throughout the project, or if you use an InCopy workflow and need to apply and reapply styles throughout a project, you’ll likely find this very useful. Even if you’ve just got a “small” redesign or update planned for a legacy publication, some of these features will help you be more efficient, and more accurate. The goal of this plug-in is to make it easier for you to

change things faster and more accurately than you can manually. Almost everything Style Utilities does can be accomplished manually, or using other tools in InDesign. So if you are a GREP or a Scripting master, you may scoff at some of these things and say to yourself “Bah! I could write a command that will do that in ten minutes.” But not all of us are capable of that. And, of course, if you’re paid by the hour and enjoy manually applying paragraph and character styles over and over, you won’t be interested in Style Utilities. But if your goal is to save time, then the price of this package will be worth it. That said, if you only need to change a few styles on occasion, or if you are pinching pennies, this plug-in set may not be the best for you. But do a little simple division to see if this is worth it. Take $39 and divide it by your hourly rate. I suspect that you’d only have to save yourself 1 or 2 hours of work to pay for this plug-in. After that, it’s all gravy. But enough glowing about this plug-in; let me show you how it works!

Installation and Guidance

Installation is as easy as with any other plug-in. Purchase the plug-in online, and download the .zip file. Quit all open versions of InDesign, open the .dmg file, click through the screens to accept the license agreement, choose the version of InDesign you want to use, select the drive to load the plug-in on, and you’re done. Once you reopen InDesign, you’ll notice that you have a new drop-down menu with options (Figure 1).

If you go to the top option, InTools Dashboard, you’ll be able to see this plug-in as well as all of the others available from In-Tools. This dashboard shows the current version and whether it’s installed. If you’re using a trial version, you’ll see how long until your license expires. The next option in the menu shows you a further drop-down that displays all of the functions included in Style Utilities. There are more details about installation in the included documentation. The documentation is clearly written. But as a person who prefers visuals to written explanations, I found it a bit dense. There are screenshots of each function to show the drop-down menus and options that you have to choose from. But one page of examples per function wouldn’t make the PDF guide much larger. Alternately, the PDF could be generated to print on US Letter-sized paper, which would reduce the number of pages, and make it easier for folks who prefer to read from a paper copy. (Although if you can read smallish print, you can slightly reduce the guide to print as a spread on an 8.5” × 11” sheet of paper.) The guide provides fuller explanations of each of these functions than I have room to describe here, but I think these examples will augment the guide and let you determine if Style Utilities is for you.

Conditional Paragraph Style Changer

This function allows you to restyle a paragraph based on the content at the beginning of that paragraph. In my example, it was decided that every paragraph that begins with “Challenge” would be changed to black text (Figure 2).

Without the plug-in, I would have to manually select each paragraph that needed to change and apply a different style. Or I’d have to create a GREP find/replace that would change this formatting (Figure 3). Style Utilities makes things a lot simpler. It lets me find every paragraph with the original “blue” style applied, and containing a specific character found in the first word, and then apply the “black” paragraph style (Figure 4). In terms of performance, once you press OK, things go quite quickly, but the speed will depend on the size of your file. If you also wanted to change the character style of the number of words you have listed in your last entry in the function, you can call it out in the bottom portion of the pane as well. This would be useful if you were using a nested paragraph style and didn’t want to alter it or create a separate paragraph style (Figure 5).

Style Between Delimiters

This function is perfect if you need to change the appearance of text within parentheses, brackets, quotes, or any other repeating characters within any given paragraph. In my example, I needed to make all of the stage directions italic when they appeared within a line of dialogue (Figure 6).

This would be very time consuming if done manually, or it can be done with GREP, but it’s easier with this function (Figure 7). The options for this function are fairly self-explanatory. You choose the paragraph and character styles you want to apply. You choose your beginning and ending characters, whether there is a minimum or maximum number of characters you want restyled, and whether you want the restyling to happen in your document, your story, or your selection (which appears only if you have text selected). Once you click OK, your changes are made. I would love an option to not style the starting and ending characters differently. In my example, I would prefer the text within my brackets to be italic, but not the brackets themselves.

Create Multi-Line Styles 

This function applies styles based on the number of lines in a paragraph. If you want to make every single-line paragraph a heading (as in Figure 8), or every three-line paragraph requires a specific style, this is the function to use.

In my example, I have a set of paragraphs that are all styled as Body text, but the single-line paragraphs are headings. Again, this could be done manually, not without a lot of time and effort. And a complicated GREP style could be used. But this is so much faster and easier. You just choose the original paragraph style, the new style you want for one-line paragraphs (or another line count, if desired), and the style you want for two-line paragraphs (or other line count, if desired).

Consecutive Styles 

If you ever wished for a function that would permit you to apply paragraph styles to consecutive paragraphs, then this is the function for you. Not only can it restyle paragraphs in a consistent order, but it can also apply styles to paragraphs that come before or after a specific style. For example, I’ll frequently have to deal with a situation where I have a bulleted list, and I want more space after the last bulleted item than between consecutive items. This is great for any time when you need the first or last instance of a style to be slightly different (maybe your first paragraph after a heading has a run-in character style). This function is easy to fill in and makes the changes quickly (Figure 9).

Apply Next Styles 

It was great back in the days of CS2, when Adobe added the Apply Next Style option to the Paragraph Styles panel. This allows you to apply a sequence of predictable styles to a range of paragraphs. Style Utilities takes things a step further by applying style sequences throughout a document, sparing you from having to locate specific instances. It’s very powerful and can be a huge time-saver in certain situations. You just choose the first paragraph style you want to begin the restyling with (Figure 10).

Create Hyperlinks from URLs 

This one should be self-explanatory. This function will find text in your file that fits a web address pattern, apply a character style to it, and turn it into a hyperlink. The great thing is that this function chooses everything that begins with https:// or www., converts it, restyles it, and even ignores manually entered line breaks on longer URLs. You simply select the character style to apply; whether you want to apply it to a document, story, or a selection; and then click OK. As you can see in the example, my style makes the text red and italic. The links appear in your Hyperlinks panel just as if you created them manually. Change Case By Style  InDesign has offered the ability to convert lowercase text to uppercase text (and several related functions) for a long time. But there are some complexities to applying Title Case. You’ll notice that Style Utilities calls this Smart Title Case, and indeed it is smarter than the Adobe default. At the bottom of the screen are two “exceptions” lists you can edit, with a few instances entered into each (Figure 11).

By editing these fields, you can keep articles like a, and, and the as lowercase. You can add anything to this list by simply typing into this field with one space between words. You can also add other instances where you want to call out capitalization. This is great for frequently used acronyms, state abbreviations, and things with tricky uses of camel caps like InDesign or ePub, for example. Add your commonly used words to this list and you’ll be spared having to search for and alter specific words. I would love it if a user could export lists to share with others. You can copy and paste, of course, but a Save/Load option would be great for larger teams who may need to frequently update these lists. More importantly, once you set this up, you can apply it quickly to all your headings or subheadings or whatever, based on a specific paragraph or character style.

All Caps to Small Caps 

Converting multiple instances of capital letters to small caps can be very frustrating. In some cases, you can use GREP, but you need to know the proper GREP expression and you need an OpenType font that supports “all small caps.” So, for the rest of us, this function changes the text quickly in one pass (Figure 12).

You can specify whether you want to choose only text with a specific paragraph or character style applied, and you can select whether you want the document, the story, or the selection. Then you select the character style that has the small caps option included, and your text is converted. Proper nouns and capital letters that begin sentences are unaffected, since the plug-in selects only multiple instances of capital letters to convert. If your character style doesn’t apply small caps, you will get a confusing error message. Ideally, this message would be edited to be clearer to a non-GREP-using person.

Time is Money

Despite a few feature requests I have, the value of Style Utilities is very clear to me, as it should be to anyone who routinely has to apply styles to any InDesign file after the text has been added. The amount of time this plug-in saves can be extensive if you run into these issues on a daily basis (or even just frequently). For the sake of space, I provided one example of each function. But there are many more uses for each function. I’m sure that as I work, I’ll find various other ways to use these functions so I can spend less time at the keyboard and more time doing other things.