general

Welcome, NENPA 2023 attendees!

And welcome, NENPA attendees’ print production folk! This is for you.

The Em Software “news flow” duo of plugins for Adobe InDesign—WordsFlow and DocsFlow—enable direct links from stories in layout to the original articles, whether in Word or Google Docs, respectively.

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InDesign 2023 plugins released

All of Em’s plugins are now released for InDesign 2023. We released WordsFlow and DocsFlow a week ago (a day after the 2023 release itself), and released InCatalog, InData and Xtags for InDesign today.

We do appreciate your patience with us on these releases. Normally we’re ready with all of them on the day of InDesign release (we’ve even been a bit early in recent years), but these releases include wrapping up some multi-month complex engineering efforts that took us right up to, and just over the wire.

You can download these latest releases, as ever, from each product’s main page, sidebar Downloads for InDesign. Individual release notes are coming right up.

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Upcoming major licensing changes

Subscriptions finally come to Em Software

Be sure to read the section Auto-upgrades to subscriptions at the end for a very important note about using pre-2023 licenses with the new MAX 2022 (InDesign 2023) release plugins. Understanding what it says may save you time and expense.

With the upcoming plugins for InDesign 2023 that Adobe will release (as usual) at MAX 2022 (October 18th) — and for newly-released plugins under InDesign 2021 and 2022 (we only officially support the latest and 2 years back) — we are making a major change in how we license all our products. This will affect everyone going forward, so we’re giving you a heads-up a month ahead of the big change, and we will be attempting to contact every user via email, pointing to this message.

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New course: InDesign—Remote Workflows with InCopy, Word, and GoogleDocs

We’re very happy to announce that our long-time friend, collaborator and world-class designer/trainer Anne-Marie Concepción of Seneca Design has released a course InDesign: Remote Workflows with InCopy, Word, and GoogleDocs 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. She shows best practices for local network servers, as well as for shared, local folders from Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive/SharePoint, and Creative Cloud files. You’ll learn ways users can concurrently edit a file in Photoshop, Illustrator, Word 365, Google Docs, InDesign, and more. She presents detailed steps to set up and use an InDesign and InCopy workflow, so editors can open InDesign layouts in InCopy and write to fit. 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.

Note that you can skip directly to the WordsFlow and DocsFlow chapters to learn more about how to use them, though you’d be wise to view the earlier chapters for a cornucopia of collaborative workflow knowledge.

LA InDesign User Group: Data Merge with InDesign

The LA InDesign User Group’s October 21st meeting will feature Em’s own Joe Mathia presenting Data Merge with InDesign, as an online event.

From the overview:

You’re probably familiar with the word processing mail merge function that allows you to send personalized letters to a number of people. In this presentation, Joe Mathia will explain how to use InDesign’s somewhat similar Data Merge function, a capability built into InDesign straight out of the box. Learn how to create personalized letters, envelopes, mailing labels, even catalogs with images.

But as powerful as the InDesign Data Merge function is, it has limitations. Joe will describe those limitations, and show how InData and InCatalog, two plugins from Em Software, expand the boundaries, taking InDesign automation to new levels. For instance, InData’s English-like scripting language, allows you to build conditional rules, including or excluding fields based on the presence or content of other fields, including one or more graphics per entry based on picture availability, etc.

Follow up

The recording is here on Vimeo: Data Merge with InDesign.

See you at Creative Pro Week next week?

If you haven’t already signed up, we can heartily endorse the annual Creative Pro Week, which we’ve been attending as exhibitors for many years. This past year was virtual, and next week’s is the same, but we’re hoping to be back in person next near.

We can’t recommend this conference enough — you’ll always learn something, and have fun to boot with the talented and engaging speakers. (Caveat: many are friends of ours, so we’re biased. 😉 )

We’ll be “there” in our virtual booth — click on our sponsor link once you’re logged in to the site.

A romp through WordsFlow and DocsFlow with Terry White on Adobe Live

Joe Mathia (with Chris Ryland kibitzing) had a great time showing our WordsFlow and DocsFlow products on Adobe Live yesterday, hosted by Terry White. Terry’s the best, and the audience was alive with excellent questions.

You can watch a replay here.

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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…

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!)

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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. 😉

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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Urgent: InDesign plug-ins expiring March 1, 2017

Due to a bad decision we made last November, many of you are seeing your CC 2017 plug-in builds expire today, March 1st (not your licenses, luckily). It’s a long story, but the bottom line is that we messed up.

If you just download and install the very latest version of the plug-in (released yesterday), it should work without further problems. You can get the latest version from the “Downloads” sidebar of your plug-in’s product page.

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

Em plugins for InDesign CC 2017

We’re in the middle of porting our plugins to the just-released InDesign CC 2017 update, and hope to have it done in the next few days.

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Come see us at PePcon 2016

We’ll be at PePcon 2016 Monday and Tuesday of next week, June 6 and 7, in San Diego at the Marriot Marina downtown, 3rd floor. (Sorry for the late notice.)

If you’re in the area, or at PePcon, please come by our table and talk to us. We’d love to see you and talk about anything that interests you.

We’re always happy to show our products and talk about how they could make your work life easier: especially the latest WordsFlow and DocsFlow releases, which have solid performance and reliability improvements.

QuarkXPress 2016 XTensions released

We’re happy to announce the immediate availability of our Xcatalog, Xdata, and Xtags XTensions for the just-released QuarkXPress 2016.

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QuarkXTensions porting to Mac OS QuarkXPress 10 and 2015

To paraphrase an old proverb about justice, “the wheels of Em Software development turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.”

It’s been a very long time since we’ve released any news about our XTensions for QuarkXPress 10 under Mac OS X—the Windows port was done mid-last-year—, mostly because we had no good news to share. We’re a small 4-man company, severely engineering-resource-limited (there’s really only one engineer who could do the work, Chris Roueche). The QuarkXPress 10 Mac OS XTension porting work loomed as a mountain we couldn’t really start climbing until we had cleared away some major obligations (the ports involved converting all code from Carbon to Cocoa, which is a serious change). We kept having to make tough engineering resource decisions over the past year that we judged the best for our customers overall. The end result of those decisions was a major delay affecting some of our QuarkXPress customers, and we’re sorry for that.

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WordsFlow and DocsFlow user guides now printable/pdf-able

In this Age of the Web, hard copy (physical or virtual) doesn’t matter to most people, but it really matters to some. So we’ve just made important parts of our web site printable or pdf-able for when you want to take some part of it offline with you in paper or digital form, for study, reference or just light vacation reading.

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Re-release of CC/CC 2014 plugins

Due to a packaging bug on our part (we initially thought it was an Extension Manager problem), we had to re-package and re-release all the CC and CC 2014 plugins just now.

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Plugins plan for InDesign CC 2014

Adobe released the Creative Cloud Suite for 2014 this week, and we want to let you know our plans. Since Adobe changed the document format, this will unfortunately require re-releases of all our plugins.

We’re ready to go with our plugin updates, but need to package and release the plugins, and are short-handed during vacation time. But we plan to have it all done and released by the end of the first full week in July (the 11th, give or take a day or three either way).

Any existing InDesign CC license will work with these new CC 2014 plugins, so you should be able to download the updated plugins and go.

Update

We released the CC 2014 plugins on July 14th and 15th, 2014. See the individual plugins’ release notes.

See you at PePcon 2014!

We’re now just two weeks away from PePcon 2014, in Chicago this year. As ever, we recommend it highly, if there are any seats left.

If you’re planning to attend, please do visit our table, where we’ll be showing our dashing new WordsFlow Pro product (hint: two-way Microsoft Word workflow!), and offering prizes, 6-month evaluation licenses, and a special 25% show discount. Plus, we’d love to meet you in the flesh, if we haven’t already; and, if we have, it’s always great to catch up…

QuarkXPress 10 XTensions update

Over the past few months, we’ve heard from a number of you wondering when our Xdata, Xcatalog, and Xtags XTensions would be ready for QuarkXPress 10. While we’ve responded individually, we’ve been remiss in not publicizing our development status. We’d like to correct this now by sharing with everyone both our current status and our plans.

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InDesign CC releases update

Quite a bit of time has slipped by since our last InDesign CC communiqué, and now with November suddenly upon us we wanted take a moment to share our InDesign CC porting progress.

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InDesign CC upgrade plans

ID-Creative-CloudWith Adobe’s InDesign CC (Creative Cloud) version just released last week, we wanted to let you know our plans for upgrading our plug-ins to work with CC. (None of them are CC-capable yet.)

First, we’re 100% committed to upgrading all our InDesign plug-ins — have no fear!

Second, we’re just starting the conversion effort, admittedly quite late. With our small engineering team (which is normally an advantage in terms of agility and staying close to you, our customers), we decided to give priority to finishing DocsFlow 2.0. (We’ve done that, and its beta is now available.) So now our focus will be 100% on upgrading all plug-in products to CC.

Third, anyone who purchases a CS5/5.5/CS6 plug-in license on or after January 1, 2013, will receive a free upgrade to a CC license.

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See you at PePcon 2013 in Austin!

PEPCON_SponsorBadge2013We’re happy to announce that we’ll be both sponsoring and attending the Print + ePublishing Conference (PePcon) 2013 conference in Austin, Texas, April 28–May 1. Marci, Anne-Marie and David have always done an outstanding job on these conferences, keeping them relevant, with great speakers, great food and attractive venues.

This time, Joe Mathia and John Whitney will be there from Em Software. Joe was at PePcon 2011 in Alexandria with Chris Ryland (who was alone last year in San Francisco), but since Joe and John are both local Texas boys (Dallas and Austin, respectively), they get to have all the fun!

We’ll be showing our current data-driven publishing products, InData, InCatalog, Xtags for InDesign, and our newer editorial/workflow products WordsFlow and DocsFlow.

In particular, we’ll be showing the latest WordsFlow and DocsFlow versions with major table-handling improvements, and we hope to be showing some major new functionality in DocsFlow as well! (Hint: it might involve edits flowing in both directions. ;-))

So please stop by and take a look at what’s new (and old).

See you there!

WordsFlow – announcing a new product

We’ve just added a section to our site about WordsFlow, a new product.

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See you at PePcon 2012 in San Francisco, May 14—16!

We’re happy to announce that we’ll be both sponsoring and attending the Print + ePublishing Conference (PePcon) 2012 conference in San Francisco, May 14—16.

We’ll have a table in the conference area. We’d love to show you what we’re doing and make new friends while catching up with the old!

David and Anne-Marie always put on a rousing conference, and this looks better than ever. Plus, you’ll get a peek at what’s coming out in CS-next from Adobe.

Our last year’s conference trip was a resounding success, and we hope to repeat that in Bagdad-by-the-Bay.

See you there!

InDesign CS5.5 plug-ins now released

As promised (and explained), we’re happy to announce the release of all our plug-ins for InDesign CS5.5 in concert with our current CS4/CS5 releases.

When you download any of our plug-ins, and double-click the .zxp installer file in the Plug-ins for InDesign CS5 folder, Adobe’s Extension Manager will install the appropriate CS5 or CS5.5 plugin, depending on your most-recently installed version of InDesign. If you have both InDesign CS5 and CS5.5 installed, and would like to install the plug-in for use in CS5, you will need to manually start Extension Manager CS5 and use its File > Install Extension to select the plug-in’s .zxp installer file.

Thanks for your patience, if you were waiting!

Updated plugins coming for InDesign CS5.5

Adobe recently released an InDesign 7.5.1 version (first minor version of CS5.5) which fixed the “bug” that CS5 plugins worked with CS5.5. Apparently, Adobe needed to require new CS5.5-specific versions of all plugins due to internal changes, but we somehow didn’t get the message ahead of time.

The result is that, if you do an auto-update of CS5.5 to the latest 7.5.1, InDesign will complain that there is a plug-in conflict with any one of our plugins.

We’re scrambling to release new versions of all our plugins that will work with CS5.5 specifically, and hope to have them sometime later this week. This is effectively a whole new release, even if it means no code changes, so we have a lot of repackaging, re-versioning, rebuilding, and re-releasing to do across all 4 plugins for MacOS and Windows.

We apologize for this mishap.

Print and ePublishing Conference 2011 (PePCon) report

Joe Mathia and I (Chris Ryland) provided Em’s presence at the (now apparently annual) InDesign Secrets Live! Print and ePublishing Conference designed and implemented by David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepción. David and Anne-Marie are just plain great people, and were wonderful hosts for the conference. (They (and other speakers) very kindly pointed people to us several times in general and specific sessions.)

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Em exhibiting at the Print and E-Publishing Conference, May 23-24

We’re happy to announce we’ll be exhibiting at the InDesign Secrets Live Print and E-Publishing Conference, May 23rd and 24th, at the Westin Alexandria.

InDesign Secret’s own David Blatner gives an overview of the developer attendees and says kind things about Em.

If you’re an Em product user and will be at the conference, we’d love to talk and find out how you’re using our products and how we could make them better. If you’re not using them, we’d be glad to show them to you in person.

We hope to be showing an entirely new product as well that may be a killer solution for editorial workflow.

So do stop by our table–we’d love to see you!

Fall 2010 newsletter

We’ve just sent our Fall 2010 newsletter with the latest news of InDesign CS5 upgrades for Xtags and EmData.

You can view it online at Em Fall 2010 Newsletter, if you didn’t receive a copy as a customer or subscriber.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for future very occasional news, or, for all your options, visit our information about keeping in touch.

Keeping in touch

We’ve fleshed out our support page about “keeping in touch” quite a bit.

We’re trying to make it easy for you to keep up with our progress on the products and on the web site (new and updated tutorials, documentation, etc.) that are coming in the future.

In particular, you can subscribe to our news using RSS (e.g., in a news reader like NetNewsWire or Google Reader), via email, via Twitter updates, and via our very occasional company email newsletter.

We intend to use Twitter both to update you when any new articles appear, and when there are non-trivial changes to the more static parts of the site. And, we’re happy to interact over Twitter for quick back-and-forth kinds of communications.

We’re also going to provide more specific news/email news feeds, for things like following the progress of a single product, or a group of related products.

So, if you’re interested in staying in touch, we urge you to try one of these methods.

And please let us know how we could improve in this effort, via email to webmaster@emsoftware.com. Thank you!

Welcome

Welcome to our new site!

We’ll be building it out over time with FAQs, tutorials, screen casts, online manuals, new products, etc., but we first had to convert our creaky old site to a new, solid foundation for future expansion.

If you have any questions about or problems with the site, or suggestions for how we might improve it to better serve you, please contact us via email to webmaster@emsoftware.com. In particular, we’d love to hear about anything you find confusing or missing.

Thanks!

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