David Blatner is an InDesign expert known for his books and participation in the InDesign Secrets site, as well as his role as editorial director of InDesign Magazine and The InDesign Conference. Clearly, this is someone who spends a frightening amount of time immersed in the inner workings of InDesign, with the inevitable result being a relentless generation of new tips and tricks. This manifested with the earlier release of a free InDesignSecrets plugin, created by veteran plugin developer DTP Tools. The plugin works with Mac or PC InDesign CS through CS3, and can be downloaded on the DTP Tools site.

Now comes Blatner Tools for Adobe InDesign, made available as a beta for Mac or PC InDesign CS3 and CS4. The collection of plugins can perform such tasks as applying a keyboard shortcut to a color swatch, a layer, or any style; automatically converting unstyled text to true paragraph and character styles; finding which graphic in an InDesign file contains a particular spot color; removing the local text formatting from a whole document; comparing two similar paragraph styles to see how they're different; and placing a script in a menu for easy access. The beta version of Blatner Tools for Adobe InDesign can be downloaded from the DTP Tools site.