WoodWing Releases Smart Styles for CS4

By: E&P Staff WoodWing Software, Zaadam, The Netherlands, today released Smart Styles for Adobe Creative Suite 4. The automated formatting tool simplifies repetitive formatting of text, frames, and other objects in InDesign and InCopy.

Besides support for CS4, the new Smart Styles release incorporates Nested Styles enhancements (including GREP) and enhancements for text with a stroke.

"The addition of table formulas has huge implications for invoices, election tallies, and sports scores," WoodWing President Erik Schut said in a statement. "Instead of having to manually enter or update values, Smart Styles can do this automatically, plus sort the table rows based on the results."

When users drag a styled object into a Smart Styles library, Smart Styles analyzes its formatting. Page designers can then drag the object from the library to another page element to apply the same formatting. Smart Styles also can deal with variations, when the target object differs from the original, thereby removing the need to manually apply repetitive styling, and allowing designers to spend more time on creative work. Because Smart Styles libraries can be opened and shared by multiple users, a designer does not have to spend time importing styles from older documents or worry about synchronizing styles among multiple InDesign templates.

Smart Styles also adds basic spreadsheet functionality to InDesign and InCopy by allowing users to insert formulas into tables and sort columns by multiple attributes, such as alphabetical or numeric values with ascending or descending options.