Apply Object Styles

If you're using a database publishing solution to produce publications such as directories, classified ads, or "Yellow Pages" with Adobe InDesign and an image-importing plugin such as Xtags, there are limitations in the types of styling that can be applied to text and picture boxes. A notable shortcoming in the InDesign tagging system is an inability to apply Object Styles to objects in tagged text files. This script addresses that issue and solves the problem.

What are Object Styles?

Object Styles are a fabulous tool to use in InDesign. You can define all kinds of properties for an object such as a text or image box, and then you can easily apply that object style to new objects you create. Let's take as an example a product catalogue. You're going to place lots of product pictures in the catalogue, and you want to give each one a border and a drop shadow, something like this:

How tedious – and error-pone – would it be to select each image, apply a border (remembering which colour, what thickness, etc. to use) and then apply a drop shadow (remembering which settings to use)? You can set up an Object Style with all those settings. Then you simply select an image and choose your Object Style. Quick, simple, and accurate.

But if your document contains large numbers of image or text frames, it's still going to be a very tedious job going through the document and applying the appropriate object style to each object. The Apply Object Styles script does the job for you! Just a few mouse clicks and your objects are all perectly styled.

Demonstration Movie

This short movie demonstrates how the script works: