I’m pleased to announce that the Layout Zone “feature”* is now available for CS4 users at the Automatication site! If you haven’t seen LayoutZone** before, you need to. It is clearly one of the top 10 “freebies”* that any InDesign user should have.
Here’s the blog post where we first described its functionality, but Layout Zone now does even more. But now in the CS4 version, besides letting you export any selection or page to a separate INDD file (and then, optionally, import that INDD file, replacing the original objects), Layout Zone can now export as PDF, SWF, IDML, or XFL. That means you can grab just a few objects and say, “I need an XFL of these, please.” Cool!
*Why did I put “feature” and “freebie” in quotes? I say “feature” because Layout Zone is technically a script, but after you install it and relaunch InDesign, it appears as a “feature” in the Edit menu. No Script panel involved. Very clean and easy. I say “freebie” because there is a big honkin’ Donate button on his site. That’s a clue. Yes, LayoutZone is free. But please (!) click that donate button if you find this script useful! Martinho has done a huge amount of work on this; he deserves whatever dollars, euros, rupees, pounds, or whatever you can send to him.
**Note that Martinho’s site seems to be inconsistent as to whether it’s called LayoutZone (no space) or Layout Zone (with a space), so I’ve decided to be inconsistent about it, too.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on April 9, 2009
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