New plug-in brings back the concept of stylesheets and promises to replace three native InDesign palettes.

While younger designers may not recognize the difference between styles and stylesheets, old hands remember the days when every layout had both. Styles are the re-usable recordings of individual paragraph and character formatting attributes we all use daily in InDesign, QuarkXPress, Illustrator, and even Microsoft Word. Most recently, InDesign CS2 added object styles—the ability to apply non-text attributes such as frame colors and insets, text wrap settings, drop shadows, and so on to any type of object, including text frames. Styles are applied one at a time, to a single object or passage of text, at a time. For instance, a magazine feature article must employ separate paragraph styles for each of the article’s title, subtitle, kicker, byline, first paragraph, body copy, captions, subheads, pullquotes, jump lines, and so forth.

Stylesheets are collections of styles. All of those styles that go into formatting a typical article would be grouped together under a stylesheet that says, this is the complete definition of our magazine’s feature articles. Another stylesheet would hold the styles to be used on a department page, and others for the cover, the table of contents, an inbrief news section, and on and on until every section and page of the magazine had its own stylesheet containing all the styles necessary to layout a complete issue to spec. In workflows where that one magazine is not the only project created, all of the individual stylesheets would be grouped under a master stylesheet named after the publication. In this way, styles from different projects are kept separate, and production artists aren’t left wondering which “Body Copy” paragraph style is to be applied to the “Politics” page.

Way back when, stylesheets were printed on paper inside envelopes we called job jackets. When you were assigned to a project, you were handed the job jacket containing the typical output specs (deliverable format, trim size, required bleed, and so forth) and stylesheets that spelled out what styles you would employ. When layout went digital, we lost a large measure of control that is only now beginning to re-emerge in the form of Job Definition Format (JDF), Digital Asset Management (DAM), and advanced flow control systems like the InDesign- and InCopy-based K4 or Quark’s Quark Publishing System. Despite the other back to the future movements, stylesheets are still missing.

Figure 1: InDesign CS2’s Paragraph Style, Character Style, and Object Style palettes.

Yesterday (literally), we were limited to InDesign’s ability to name styles whatever you wanted, then to base styles to each other in a cascading effect—Heading 3 (or “HC”) was based on Heading 2 (”HB”), which was based on Heading 1 (”HA”)—and, with a little InDesign magic, all of those formats could be applied in order. Still, the three styles palettes—Paragraph, Character, and Object—often became long, unweildly lists of style names (see Figure 1). Should the “LT HA” style be applied to the “Letter from the Editor” page, or the “Letters to the Editor” page? Knowing which style to use often involved referencing a printed key that explained the shorthand. Talk about error-prone and inefficient!

Today (literally), we have a return to actual stylesheets in the form of a free plug-in from RogueSheep, Style Flocker.

Style Grouping = Stylesheets

Figure 2: The Style Flocker palette document styles organized into basic stylesheets.

RogueSheep doesn’t actually use the word stylesheet, but that’s what Style Flocker does: It groups styles together to enable the use of true stylesheets. In the single Style Flocker palette (see Figure 2) all of a document’s paragraph, character, and object styles may be placed into “flocks” or groups, to create logical grouping of related styles.

Continuing with the magazine example, all the required paragraph styles for a feature article can be placed into a “Feature” group. But not just the paragraph styles. Character styles, such as those typically created for italic or smallcap text, various underlines, figure references, dropcaps, and list bullet and number characters may be placed in the “Feature” group to keep them separate and distinguisable from similar styles created for other sections of the magazine. The one Style Flocker palette group can even hold needed object styles created for illos (illustrations), callouts, tables, anchored objects, sidebars, caption text frames, and the feature article’s main text frame with options such as number of columns and inset variables.

InDesign scatters these three types of styles throughout their respective palettes, which is a programmer’s way of organizing, separating kinds of objects. Style Flocker organizes styles to fit the way designers work by bringing all the styles together into one list. Designers must recognize and care about the differences between, say, a paragraph style and object style, but what types of objects they style is not as important to a designer or production artist as what portion of the content they will format and when. By putting all three kinds of style definitions into user-definable groups, Style Flocker enables creatives to finally organize their styles according to project, section, page, or area of content. And, because styles on the palette retain their unique identifying icons, designers can still instantly discern a paragraph style from a character or object style, retaining that secondary, but still important, level of organization.

Even better, flocks are nestable. One flock may contain another, which contains two others, each of which having their own sub-groups, and so on.

Next: The Good

The Good

Having experience with layer groups using DTP Tools improved Layers palette for InDesign and InCopy or Photoshop’s and Illustrator’s native layer sets will make Style Flocker almost instantly usable. Even without the prior familiarity to the concept, it’s an easy learn.

After a fast and easy installation, Style Flocker pops up automatically with InDesign. Initially, with no documents opened, Style Flocker will show only InDesign’s six default styles—”Basic Paragraph,” “No Paragraph Style,” “Basic Graphics Frame,” “Basic Text Frame,” and two “None” styles, one each from the Character and Object styles palettes. These automatically appear in an “InDesign Defined Styles” flock (aka group). Opening a pre-created document that has its own style definitions will add those into the palette under “User Defined Styles.”

At the bottom of the palette, beside the cleverly placed RogueSheep logo, is the standard icon New button. Clicking the New button will create a new flock. Name it inline, then proceed to drag styles from either the “InDesign Defined Styles” or “User Defined Styles” groups (twirl down the expansion arrow if necessary). To created nested flocks, simply drag one flock and drop it atop another.

Just like in Photoshop or Illustrator, these groups can be renamed inline by double-clicking on the name, or by choosing the Rename Flock command from the palette’s flyout menu. Flocks can be deleted by dragging them to the equally familiar trash can at the bottom of the palette or with the Remove Flock command, also on the palette flyout menu.

Make a mistake? No problem: Like everything else in InDesign, actions on the StyleFlock palette are undoable with CMD+Z (CTRL+Z on Windows).

Figure 3: With a style selected, the grey remove button appears.

When clicking on a style, a grey circle with an X inside appears to the right, as you can see in Figure three. Clicking the X will remove the style from the Style Flocker palette, but not from the document. This is very handy for reducing the clutter of InDesign’s default and undeleteable styles such as “Basic Paragraph” or “None”. Accidentally unflocked styles remain on their respective native palettes, and can be re-flocked with the palette menu’s Add submenus (see Figure 4). Three in all, these submenus provide live listings of the contents of the Paragraph, Character, and Object Styles palettes; one click adds the style into Style Flocker without the need to go through a messy import dialog. If even that isn’t convenient enough for you, you can drag styles directly from the native InDesign palettes into Style Flocker—even multiple styles all at once!

Figure 4: Style Flocker’s palette flyout menu and Add Paragraph Style submenu.

To apply styles, simply select text or objects as usual, and click on a style entry in Style Flocker.

All the styles, of any type, applied to the currently selected item are listed in the palette’s status area at the top. You can see at a glance which paragraph, character, and object styles are applied to the selected text and/or object without having to look through—and possibly scroll within—multiple palettes or tab between the Paragraph and Character Styles palettes.

(On a side note: It has always bugged me to no end that InDesign’s default workspace has those two palettes grouped and tabbed so they can’t be seen and used simultaneously. The very first thing I do when setting up a new InDesign workspace is to stack Paragraph Styles above Character Styles. While there are always exceptions, I ask you: Who doesn’t most often use paragraph styles while employing character styles?)

Styles can even appear in multiple flocks simultaneously. Say, for example, the “Subhead” paragraph style is identical across a project’s multiple sections. Drag the “Subhead” style from the Paragraph Styles palette and drop it into all of the section flocks. The style itself won’t be duplicated—changing the actual style on the Paragraph Styles palette still changes all instances throughout the document—it’s just the references to it that are replicated.

And, this brings us to Style Flocker’s limitations.

The Bad

Style Flocker doesn’t support InCopy, so editorial personnel, arguably those in greatest need of stylesheets and style organization, are stuck with the same old style palettes. This is surprising given that RogueSheep is comprised almost entirely of former Adobe InDesign and InCopy developers. Fortunately, because the Style Flocker palette only references styles rather than containing its own, documents that employ it are still fully useable in InCopy. We didn’t even see the missing plug-in alert upon opening either assignments or the .INDD file itself in InCopy CS2.

While the total lack of InCopy support is disappointing, there’s another glaring omission in Style Flocker: You can’t create or edit styles with it.

RogueSheep claims that Style Flocker can replace InDesign’s Paragraph, Character, and Object Styles palettes. While that’s true in cases where the stylesheets are fixed and no new styles need be created, it doesn’t hold water while creating or editing styles. Style Flocker will allow unfettered organizational freedom and typical one-click application of styles, but to edit those styles or create new ones, you have to either go back to InDesign’s style palettes or use the even less convenient Style Options command from the Control Palette’s flyout menu. Double-clicking the style in the Style Flocker palette does nothing.

So, you can’t really replace any palettes with Style Flocker, but you can reclaim some screen real estate. With Style Flocker handling your style application and organization, you can group together (tab) the individual Paragraph, Character, and Object Styles palettes or even reduce their heights to a minimum. It isn’t fewer palettes, per se, but you aren’t required to give them as much space now.

Here’s a tip: Create multiple workspaces, one to employ when creating or editing styles and includes Style Flocker and the three style palettes, and another workspace for working with a fixed stylesheet, hiding InDesign’s styles palettes.

On the palete flyout menu is a Show Palette for Style Drag submenu, which you’ll likely never use. The menu opens any of InDesign’s own styles palettes, but it’s even less convenient than going to the Window menu. Moreover, InDesign work is style-intensive—you need to be able to create and edit styles on the fly. I predict you’ll find yourself ignoring the Show Palette for Style Drag menu and simply leaving the other palettes on screen somewhere.

Style Flocker also will not update itself to reflect newly created styles. They have to be manually added to the palette from the Add flyout menus or by dragging and dropping from InDesign’s styles palettes.

The Ugly

We discovered one bug while using Style Flocker on Windows. Resizing the width of the palette undesireably alters its height proportionately, as if the corner were being dragged instead of just the side. This happened within InDesign CS2 running on Windows XP Pro SP2 on two different test systems. Fortunately, it did not occur on any of our Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4 systems.

Truly, this bug is as minor and inconsequential as it can be and still qualify for being called ugly. If you experience this behavior, set your width, then drag the bottom edge of the palette to set its height. The bug only occurs when dragging the side borders, not the top and bottom.

InDesign’s Workspaces do record and apply positioning and sizing to the Style Flocker palette, so update your usual workspace(s) after arranging this palette.

Wishlist

Naturally, I’d like to see Style Flocker updated to incorporate InCopy support, but there are some other features it should also have:

• The ability to create styles. Like native style palettes, this should be a call to the New Style dialog depending on which of the three new style buttons a user clicks on. Newly created styles should be added to the correct area of InDesign (i.e. the respective native palette), and a reference instantly generated in Style Flocker.
• Similarly, the ability to edit styles is crucial.
• Being able to print out the contents of Style Flocker would be useful in building a printed style guide, but, even more useful would be…
• Making Style Flocker’s palette contents an exportable XML file that can be shared with other Style Flocker users across the workgroup (independent of documents), and imported as page content into, say, an InDesign layout to be used as the basis for building a style guide manual (printed or PDF).
• Ideally, Style Flocker would give the user the option of not only exporting or printing the list of flocks and style names and types, but also the actual style definitions themselves, pulling data from the style definition summary.
• Color coding of flocks.
• Import flocks from another document for rapid backwards, uh, flocking. Even with an XML export, importing flocks would have a benefit to productivity.
• A MRU (Most Recently Used) list of styles similar to Microsoft Word’s Styles palette. Flocks are extremely convenient, but it would benefit designers of long, many-styled documents to have a quick list of their last 5-10 styles separate from the flocks lists.
• A “Sort Alphabetically” toggle to temporarily impose a Quick Apply-like UI onto Style Flocker (effectively, Quick Apply inclusive of Object Styles).
• Replace Quick Apply entirely by adding a keyboard shortcut to take focus into the Style Flocker palette, keyboard arrow or letter navigation to desired styles, and Enter/Return application of the highlighted style.

The Final Word

This kind of style unification and organization is overdue, and we should have seen it first from Adobe—just like layer sets, a History palette, and some other remarkably useful things you’ll see plug-in developers adding to InDesign over the next few months.

Despite the bad and the ugly, Style Flocker is a true must-have plug-in for anyone who works with more than a handful of styles. In fact, this review would have been published earlier in the day if I hadn’t been on the phone telling my clients and friends to go download Style Flocker. It’s already deployed across every system in my studio.

Style Flocker is so useful that, to be candid, I’m surprised RogueSheep is giving it away free. I would have happily paid $14.99-$19.99 for it. (Shh! Don’t tell RogueSheep!) I suggest you go get it before Jeff Argast and company wise up and slap a price tag on this one.

Style Flocker 1.0 is available as of today for InDesign CS and InDesign CS2 for Windows or Mac OS X, and is a [1] free download for all. For more about RogueSheep’s products, read [2] the Quark VS InDesign.com’s reviews, or [3] visit RogueSheep directly.