InDesign© Plugins

What is Story Tools?

Stories in InDesign have no logical order. The order of stories are in fact completely arbitrary. While one can layout stories in a visual order by manually placing the text frames of one story following another, there is no good way to automate layout across multiple stories.

Story Tools introduces a new concept to InDesign—“Story Strings”.

The purpose of Story Tools, is to remedy this shortcoming. Story Tools gives you the ability to break up stories while keeping the text order, as well as define unrelated stories in a logical order. Once the stories are defined as “Story Strings” (a series of stories with a defined order) there are many options which open up to us.

In fact, one of the impetuses for creating Story Tools was a specific job which came in as over 40 different Word documents. They were to be laid out in a specific order. The problem was: there was no order identifiable by the file names. The order was based on the first words in each document—a designer’s nightmare!

Using Story Tools, once all the files are imported—by drag and drop for example, ordering the stories is a simple matter. Story Tools can automatically label the stories based on the first words. Tell Story Tools the correct order, and the stories are all laid out correctly.

A time-consuming and frustrating task becomes amazingly quick and easy with the Story Tools plug-in!

Story Tools integrates with many of the other plug-ins available from In- Tools.

• Breaking up a story into smaller stories can greatly improve the performance of Proper VJ.

• When a story is broken into smaller ones using Story Tools, AutoFlow Pro can be used to automatically add pages as necessary. These pages will be added between stories, and will not adversely affect the layout.

• Column Flow can automatically flow story strings one following the other.