Feature Highlight: Smart Layout intelligent article placement

WoodWing’s Smart Layout is a set of productivity plug-ins designed to help InDesign and InCopy users work with text frames more intelligently.

When installed, a special Smart Layout tool becomes available in InDesign. Designers draw frames with this tool and can label them with descriptive names in the Element Labels palette. Then, when an article is dropped onto this frame, the proper components get placed into the corresponding frames.

Smart Layout can automatically place components into the properly labeled text frames.

Smart Layout is more than just a placement tool, however. When drawing a Smart Layout frame, it can automatically wrap itself around other objects, preventing the need for elaborate InDesign text wrap settings. It can also solve InDesign’s vertical justification issues. By creating individual frames for columns, the columns can independently be resized to prevent situations where InDesign’s vertical justification fails to align the baseline of multiple columns of text under a graphics frame.

InCopy users benefit from this tool as well. They can add text components on the fly to articles that have not been placed on the page, alleviating the need for multiple InCopy templates. It also lets InCopy users fit text within an article.

Smart Layout allows InCopy users to add text components as needed, without using templates.

In both Adobe application, a copyfitting palette lets users play with tracking, kerning and other options to force text to fit within a frame while designating a range that will prevent the users from breaking style guide rules.

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