news

WordsFlow at Eastern European Mission

Scott Hayes at the Eastern European Mission (eem.org) writes eloquently about how WordsFlow has transformed their incredibly challenging multi-lingual workflow. Key insight:

For us WordsFlow was a revolution in technology unlike anything we have implemented in the last 10 years.

New Icons and Symbols plugin for Adobe XD

We’re beyond excited to announce that Em Software, after 20 years developing InDesign plugins, is starting a whole new phase of life with plugins for Adobe XD! We’re honored to be one of the first developers using the Plugins Panel, which is new in XD version 22.

Our first product is Icons and Symbols, a plugin that searches 5,000+ free, high-quality, no-attribution-required icons and symbols. Search by icon name (e.g., ‘arrow’), and place any icons in the result list with a click, resulting in a vector-based, fully-editable icon. Icons and Symbols includes a dozen popular icon collections in a range of styles, including Font Awesome, Feather, and Material.

We’ll be at Adobe MAX 2019, Nov 4-6!

We’ll be exhibiting in the partner kiosk area at Adobe MAX 2019, November 4-6, 2019, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. This is our first year at MAX, and we’re really looking forward to it, as the annual heart of all things Adobe.

We’d sure love to meet any of you who are attending!

And we hope to be showing exciting new things at the show. Details to come…

DocsFlow at the Star News Group

Super-consultant Gil Poulsen has written a fantastic overview of how the New Jersey-based Star News Group has adopted DocsFlow for their editorial workflow.

WordsFlow vs. InCopy

(We just added this section to the WordsFlow product page, and thought it was worth sharing here.)

InCopy is a great solution if you need your authors and editors to work with exactly what’s going to be seen in the final InDesign document.

However, working with WordsFlow does have some serious advantages:

If your authors/editors have used Word all their lives, there’s no need to change their work habits or learn something new, using WordsFlow. They can stay productive in their long- and hard-earned knowledge of Word, with all its editorial power. InCopy is basically “baby InDesign,” and is a completely foreign world to Word users.
In fact, your Word users don’t even have to know you’re using WordsFlow–it’s entirely invisible to them. It just makes you, the production user or team, look a lot faster, smarter, and more accurate. (No more botched manual merges.)
WordsFlow enables InDesign production to proceed in parallel with editing in Word. InCopy stops all other work on a story while it’s checked out.
ICML (the InCopy native document format) can really only be used to feed InDesign. WordsFlow allows you to link document formats that can be used for other purposes.
WordsFlow is more production proof in that you can control the formatting on the InDesign side and review changes made by the editors before accepting. When an InCopy story is checked in, that’s it.
With WordsFlow, your authors and editors don’t need to be burdened with all the styling and other layout details in the InDesign story. It’s a well-known trope that dealing with the details of text formatting while writing is a huge distraction from the real job at hand. And your InDesign production folks will be glad your authors and editors don’t get to meddle with those details.
Cost! Each of your authors and editors needs an InCopy license, while only your production (InDesign) users need a WordsFlow license.

Release: Xtags 3.15 for QuarkXPress 2017/2018/2019

This release of Xtags adds support for QuarkXPress 2019 and discontinues support for QuarkXPress 2016.

Release: Xcatalog 3.14 for QuarkXPress 2017/2018/2019

This release of Xcatalog adds support for QuarkXPress 2019 and discontinues support for QuarkXPress 2016.

Release: Xdata 4.10 for QuarkXPress 2017/2018/2019

This release of Xdata adds support for QuarkXPress 2019 and discontinues support for QuarkXPress 2016.

Release: InCatalog 2.22.6 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch fixes the handling of special characters in Price Styles files.

Release: DocsFlow 2.17.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch release fixes compatibility with Google Drive Shared drives and improves stability when working with endnotes.

Release: InData 2.9.2 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch fixes Anchored Object settings on imported frames.

Release: Xtags 2.8.4 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch fixes a bug that was producing incorrect picture box tags.

New online store

We’re overjoyed to announce that we have an entirely new, modern, adaptive, sleek, fast, localized online store with many more payment options.

Truly easy to use

There are many wonderful things about this new store, but the main improvement is that it’s so much easier to use.

Click on a Buy button on any of the product pages (or on a Get License button in any of the products’ License dialogs) and, boom, you’re taken to a check-out page for that product immediately. Fill in your email, name (optional company), and credit card info, and, boom, you’re looking at your new license with full instructions on how to get to back to work with your new power tool. (We’ll also send an email receipt right away with full information for your records.) Couldn’t be simpler or faster.

Em futures June 2019

We can’t predict the future, of course, but we can tell you what we’ve been doing recently, and what we’re planning to work on. (None of these are specific commitments nor promises, of course, but we’ll do our best!)

June 2019 products progress report

This is a brief summary of progress on our products, going back now three years to our most recent (June 2016) “quarterly” newsletter progress report. 😉

SPI Connector for Box + WordsFlow bundle

We’re happy to announce the results of a recent collaboration effort with Silicon Publishing, Inc (SPI), resulting in a Box Connector + WordsFlow bundle.

Brett Kizner from Silicon Publishing says it best:

We’ve been friends with the folks from Em Software for a long time. Just as our Connector solves a common problem of linking assets from a DAM [digital asset management system] or file sharing service to your InDesign documents, WordsFlow creates a dynamic link with magic-merge capabilities from a Microsoft Word or Excel document to your InDesign document. We realized that when you combine the two solutions, you get a powerful collaborative editorial toolset breaking the barriers between the writers and the designers so we are proud to work with the Em Software team to bring a combined solution to market.

Release: WordsFlow 2.15.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch release works around an InDesign bug and fixes a few problems with exporting and updating.

Release: DocsFlow 2.17 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This release centralizes import settings, improves support for hyperlinks and cross-references, and enhances product stability.

Release: InCatalog 2.22.5 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch improves product stability when using tagged text initialization files.

Release: WordsFlow 2.15 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This release improves stability when working with hyperlinks and cross-references.

Release: Xtags 2.8.3 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This release adds tags for page break characters and improves text box compatibility with object styles.

Nell Chitty writes “A Designer’s Love Letter to WordsFlow”

Nell wrote a wonderfully helpful love letter to WordsFlow about a year ago, and we let it go by without note. It’s so good that we wanted to bring it up and share it with you, in spite of the time passage.

I first learnt about WordsFlow when watching a tutorial on Lynda.com on Word and InDesign Integration. I have found that clients love the control they have over the text using WordsFlow, that they get to work in an application they’re comfortable with (I’ve yet to meet someone who uses InCopy), and how fast I can output an updated PDF for them. Before, they’d have to wait for me to make the text changes they need, but now I just need to press a button. Its great!

The post is great–read the whole thing. Thanks, Nell!

Release: Xtags 3.14.1 for QuarkXPress 2016/2017/2018

This patch fixes conditional picture imports and lets old-style Mac-Roman/Win-Latin files contain embedded utf-8-encoded Unicode characters.

Release: Xtags 2.8.2 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch allows embedded utf-8-encoded Unicode characters in Mac-Roman/Win-Latin files.

Release: InCatalog 2.22.3 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch fixes a problem with ODBC key field auto-quoting.

Release: Xcatalog 3.13.1 for QuarkXPress 2016/2017/2018

This patch release fixes a few issues with key fields.

Release: WordsFlow 2.14.2 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch fixes the export of images placed from multi-image files.

Release: DocsFlow 2.16.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch responds to an upcoming Google server change and fixes a problem with drag’n’drop from Google Drive FS.

Release: InData 2.9.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch allows embedded utf-8-encoded Unicode characters in Mac-Roman/Win-Latin imports.

Release: InCatalog 2.22.2 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch fixes a crash when closing a Create Data dialog in newer macOSes.

Release: Xtags 2.8.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch release fixes how poorly-encoded tagged text files are reported.

Release: InCatalog 2.22.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch release fixes a problem with key-from-contents links.

Release: WordsFlow 2.14.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This patch release fixes a problem with updating Excel links in InDesign CC 2019.

Release: Xtags 2.8 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This release adds support for just-released InDesign CC 2019.

Release: InData 2.9 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This release adds support for just-released InDesign CC 2019.

Release: InCatalog 2.22 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This release adds support for just-released InDesign CC 2019.

Release: DocsFlow 2.16 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This release adds support for just-released InDesign CC 2019 and fixes some minor issues.

Release: WordsFlow 2.14 for InDesign CS5–CC2019

This release adds support for just-released InDesign CC 2019.

Release: Xcatalog 3.13 for QuarkXPress 2016/2017/2018

This release adds support for default field values and addresses a couple minor issues.

Release: Xtags 3.14 for QuarkXPress 2016/2017/2018

This release of Xtags removes support for obsolete bit-mapped frame styles.

Release: Xtags 2.7 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release adds a frame alignment parameter and removes support for bit-mapped frame styles.

Release: InCatalog 2.21 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release adds support for default field values and addresses a few minor issues.

Release: WordsFlow 2.13.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This patch improves stability when working with bookmarks and endnotes, fixes problems with Place with WordsFlow…, and addresses an issue with commas in exported style names.

Release: Xtags 2.6.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This patch release addresses problems with applying character, paragraph, and object styles.

Release: WordsFlow 2.13 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release greatly improves Word exports, adds a way to directly create WordsFlow links, and makes placing with WordsFlow scriptable.

Release: DocsFlow 2.15.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This patch release includes a fix for the Import Options dialog in InDesign CC 2018.

Release: WordsFlow 2.12 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release prevents unnecessary Missing Plug-ins messages and improves product stability.

Release: DocsFlow 2.15 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release prevents unnecessary Missing Plug-ins messages, overhauls progress bars, reduces document load times, and improves stability when updating stories.

June 2018 progress report

We thought it would be a good time (right before CreativePro Week 2018) to stop and take a look at the progress we’ve made with the InDesign plug-in products over the past year or so.

Of course, the InDesign plug-ins were all upgraded for the CC 2018 release back in mid-October 2017.

And we’ll gloss over the dozens of ongoing smaller improvements and bug fixes that are part of the normal process of keeping the products “in tune” and up to date. For those details, you can view each product’s release news using the “release history” links below.

Release: WordsFlow 2.11.2 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This quick release improves compatibility with Excel files and adds basic support for InDesign index markers.

Release: Xcatalog 3.12 for QuarkXPress 2016/2017/2018

This release of Xcatalog adds support for QuarkXPress 2018 and discontinues support for QuarkXPress 2015.

Release: Xdata 4.9 for QuarkXPress 2016/2017/2018

This release of Xdata adds support for QuarkXPress 2018, discontinues support for QuarkXPress 2015, and fixes problems with the macOS Universal Clipboard.

Release: Xtags 3.13 for QuarkXPress 2016/2017/2018

This release of Xtags adds support for QuarkXPress 2018, discontinues support for QuarkXPress 2015, and fixes a problem with the macOS Universal Clipboard.

InDesign Rejects Custom Excel Cell Ranges

We’ve recently discovered that InDesign’s Excel import filter has a weird, long-standing bug where it won’t accept a custom Cell Range if the sheet contains exactly 26 columns (or a multiple of 26 columns). While it’s annoying if you run into this problem while Placing a sheet with WordsFlow, it’s downright insidious if you run into it while updating a linked sheet.

Come see us at Creative Pro Week 2018!

We’ll be at Creative Pro Week 2018 the week of June 3rd, in New Orleans.

If you’re planning to attend any of that week, including the InDesign Conference (Tue/Wed) and PePCon (Thu), or just in the area, please drop by our table. We’d love to see you and discuss anything of interest.

We’re always happy to show our products and talk about how they could make your work life easier. We’ll be demo’ing the latest WordsFlow and DocsFlow releases, which have solid performance and reliability improvements, as well as our perennial data publishing favorites, InData and InCatalog.

As a bonus for our readers, you can apply the coupon code CPWWEM for a $100 discount on any of the multi-day events at Creative Pro Week.

Release: DocsFlow 2.14.4 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release addresses issues with column breaks, Team Drives, exporting, and updating.

Release: InData 2.8.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This patch fixes an incompatibility with macOS Sierra’s Universal Clipboard.

Release: WordsFlow 2.11.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release fixes problems with updating and improves stability.

Release: InData 2.8 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release augments the fieldindex() function and corrects a long-standing problem when using XPress Tags translation tables in styled puts.

Release: DocsFlow 2.14.3 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release works much more efficiently with large tables and fixes a couple minor problems.

Release: WordsFlow 2.11 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release adds full support for CC 2018’s endnotes and includes a number of other fairly significant fixes and improvements.

Release: Xtags 2.6 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release supports Quark’s new Conditional Style Markers (<\r>), adds Frame Fitting parameters, and improves compatibility with object styles.

Release: DocsFlow 2.14.2 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release fixes a connection issue with Google Team Drive accounts.

Release: WordsFlow 2.10.2 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release fixes a compatibility problem with links created without WordsFlow installed.

Release: DocsFlow 2.14.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release fixes a problem with connections to some non-Team Drive accounts.

Release: DocsFlow 2.14 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release adds support for Google Team Drives and Google Drive File Stream.

Release: Xtags 3.12 for QuarkXPress 2015/2016/2017

This release supports Quark’s new Conditional Style Markers (<\r>).

Release: DocsFlow 2.13.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This patch addresses incompatibilities with CC 2018’s new endnotes feature.

Release: InData 2.7.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This patch fixes a problem with the pageinfo function.

Release: WordsFlow 2.10.1 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This patch addresses incompatibilities with CC 2018’s new endnotes feature.

Release: DocsFlow 2.13 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release adds support for just-released InDesign CC 2018.

Em plug-ins for Adobe InDesign CC 2018

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve released all but one of our plug-ins for Adobe’s just-released InDesign CC 2018 update. Notably absent is DocsFlow, in which we found a last minute show-stopper. We hope to have it fixed and released in the next few days, so keep an eye on our release channel for further DocsFlow news.

Release: Xtags 2.5 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release adds support for just-released InDesign CC 2018.

Release: InData 2.7 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release adds support for just-released InDesign CC 2018.

Release: InCatalog 2.20 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release adds support for just-released InDesign CC 2018.

Release: WordsFlow 2.10 for InDesign CS5–CC2018

This release adds support for just-released InDesign CC 2018 and includes a couple minor fixes.

Connecting with FileMaker Pro 16

On macOS, our InCatalog and Xcatalog data linking products use a technology called Apple Events to make a direct, non-odbc connection with FileMaker Pro. Unfortunately, FileMaker Pro 16’s new Extended Privilege security setting disables support for this type of connection by default. So while InCatalog 2.19 (or later) and Xcatalog 3.10 (or later) support FileMaker Pro 16, they may fail to establish a connection with a fresh installation of it or may fail with an error like

The on-line access of field ‘price’ (subfield ‘0’, key ‘xyz’, data descriptor ‘MyDD.txt’, map ‘’) failed: error -10004 ()

when attempting to update with it.

If that doesn’t work, please contact us at support, and we’ll get you going.

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