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We released all our plugins, now compatible with InDesign 2023, around Adobe MAX 2022 in mid-October to coincide with the annual InDesign update. See the news item InDesign 2023 plugins released for more information.

We now officially sell and support the three most recent major versions of InDesign: 2021, 2022, and 2023.

We do sell and support earlier versions back to CS6 (downloadable from each plugin‘s history page), but we can‘t fix bugs nor add features to them. (Then again, the final releases of these older version are quite stable.)

With these latest releases, we‘ve officially switched to subscription licensing, as previewed in the September news item Upcoming major licensing changes.

Basically, we‘re now selling time-based subscription licenses (12 months to start), rather than our old-style perpetual-for-a-major-version-of-InDesign-with-upgrades-at-new-major-versions-and-grace-periods-license scheme which was always complicated and confusing.

The most important information to note is “Licenses at this transition“ in the news article InDesign 2023 plugins released, which details how your existing InDesign 2021/2022 licenses would automatically convert to subscriptions on first use, if still within range. (To make sure you‘re getting your money‘s worth at this transition, old-style new licenses are promoted to a 2-year subscription from point of purchase, and upgrade licenses to a 1-year.)

This subscription scheme best matches the way we have operated for a long time, which is to release features and fixes on a rolling basis throughout the year, rather than all-at-once in a major annual upgrade like Adobe. With these new licenses, you never have to worry about InDesign versions and major upgrades, nor plugin versions and updates/upgrades again, as long as you have a subscription. (For pre-2021 InDesigns, we can still sell the old-style licenses.)

Even better, the new subscriptions scheme has lowered the up-front cost of our products by 40%.

Our biggest news continues to be the early-last-year release of WordsFlow with a brand-new three-years-in-the-making Word (.docx) import filter developed in-house.

Since then, we‘ve issued 11 releases with a whole slew of feature updates and fixes, culminating in the 3.8 release for InDesign 2021-2023. These updates include a footnote/endnote import option, native Apple Silicon support, highlight mapping, importing endnotes as static text, support for WPS Office, large file performance improvements, hyperlink style mapping and emoticon support, and a stream of improvements to our Word filter.

Catch up on all the WordsFlow news.

See the glowing WordsFlow 3 review (PDF) in InDesign Magazine—they give it 5 stars!

The biggest change since the last newsletter for DocsFlow was switching to use .docx files for interchange with Google Docs (i.e., Google‘s best-supported intermediate format) in the 3.4 release.

DocsFlow has had 12 releases with feature updates and fixes, resulting in the 3.11 release for InDesign 2021-2023. These include hyperlink style mapping, emoji support, performance improvements, support for placing and updating linked Microsoft Word documents (.docx files) directly from Google Drive, native Apple Silicon support, new footnote/endnote handling, better bullet style mapping, and a suite of reliability improvements.

Catch up on all the DocsFlow news.

Since the last newsletter, all of the ”big three” data publishing tools—InData, InCatalog, and Xtags—have gotten native Apple Silicon support.

More importantly, we added a powerful new facility to import graphics via URL in all three products. Anywhere you would use a local file path to import a graphic, you can now supply a full URL. You can create either placeholder graphics which are essentially “pasted” in, or full-resolution downloads which become InDesign links to locally cached copies, and with optional name-collision avoidance.

InData received serious scripting improvements for sub-stories and headers/footers, new support for inline InDesign-native QR code generation, and better UI for header/footer creation. The fileexists() function also now supports URLs as well as local file paths, as does filecontents().

InCatalog received new link-aware insertion/selection machinery that gives you full control of where insertions go when editing in the presence of InCatalog links. Previously, it was nigh impossible to insert text right before or right after a link, or between two touching links, etc.

Catch up on all the InData news, InCatalog news, and Xtags news.

Anne-Marie Concepción of Seneca Design has released a course Collaborative Workflows for Editors and Designers on LinkedIn Learning, which includes two chapters respectively on getting started with WordsFlow and DocsFlow.

You know a collaborative workflow can benefit your editing and design teams, but how do you set it up inexpensively and effectively? In this course, instructor Anne-Marie Concepción walks you through a number of free solutions that allow mixed-platform designers, writers, and editors to work concurrently on a single publication, whether they’re on-site or remote. […] Anne-Marie also covers in-depth solutions that allow publishing teams to link Microsoft Word [WordsFlow] and Google Docs [DocsFlow] to live InDesign layouts, allowing for concurrent design and editorial development.

The good news is that, even if you don’t have a LinkedIn Learning (originally lynda.com) account, the link above gives you a free 30-day trial, which should be more than adequate to take advantage of this course.

We provided once again a quick 4-minute WordsFlow video for Adobe MAX 2022 showing how WordsFlow can greatly accelerate your production workflow.

We’re happy to provide free project consultations.

Contact us at support@emsoftware.com with a quick overview of your current project, and we should be able to quickly help you figure out if our tools could make a difference.

All our tools have full-featured 15-day free trial periods, so you can see them working in-house before making any decisions.

Visit our home page for a full list of products.

See case studies of all our products.