Have you ever needed to have some sort of detailed report listing all the Paragraph and Character styles in an InDesign layout file, including their settings? Something like this?
You could ask the intern to do it, but it’s better that you leave their time free for valuable tasks like making Starbucks runs. Instead, the next time you need some sort of documentation for how a layout’s styles are set up, download Dave Saunders’ cross-platform shareware script, TextStylesReporterCS2, for InDesign CS2 (and CS3 … keep reading).
Click that link to download the .zip file, then un-zip it and read the ReadMe for what needs to go into your Scripts folder.
After you install it, all you have to do is open the source layout and double-click the script in your Scripts panel (from the Window > Automation submenu in InDesign CS3). It creates a nicely formatted report?in as much or as little detail as you want?faster than any human being could, let alone an intern.
Before it makes the report, the script puts up a dialog box that lets you choose exactly which attributes of the styles should be included. Take a look (click to enlarge):
See that menu at the bottom I’m pressing on? The Sort Order of Report menu lets you change the style listing order from the default Alphabetic to “Based On.” That is SO helpful when you’re wrestling with someone’s Byzantine style hierarchies, trying to figure out who’s leaning on who.
Since he created this thing of beauty back in 2006, Dave Saunders moved on to other tasks (he stopped development/support for it, but said it was okay to post about it when I asked), so officially it’s a CS2-only script. But if you use the “Version 4.0 Scripts” folder trick that David wrote up in a blog post last year, TextStylesReporter will work just fine in InDesign CS3. (How do you think I got these screen shots?)
David’s post: Using Old Scripts in CS3
TextStylesReporter.jsx is shareware, meaning it’s fully enabled at no cost. But — assuming it works and is valuable for you — in the .zip file that you download, please open the ReadMe.pdf to find the link to donate a shareware fee to Dave. Give till it hurts! Seriously, we must support our friendly, generous community of amazing InDesign scripters as much as we can. Fame and adulation don’t pay the mortgage. ;-)
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on August 29, 2008
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