Projects

Mindfire has deep experience developing InDesign and Acrobat plug-ins on both Windows and Mac OS X. We describe some of these Acrobat and InDesign plug-in development project experiences below, and will be glad to share our expertise in detail with you.

• Editing and Placement Plugins (Adobe InDesign and InCopy)
• Web-based Content Browser/Updater InCopy Plugin
• File format conversion to .DXF or .DWG
• Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress Layout Converter or Exporter
• Spell Checker and Hyphenator Engine
• InDesign Xpress Plug-ins
• InDesign CS5 and Creative Suite SDK Development
• iPrint Porting and Enhancements

Industry:
Publishing Business Domain Products
Technologies:
PostgreSQL DB, gSOAP, WxWidgets, Adobe InDesign/InCopy CS2, COM, Mac OSX and Windows XP

These are crucial components of a n-tier architecture based Client-Server Enterprise Product. Essentially, these plug-ins work with InDesign documents in InDesign & InCopy, and communicate via gSOAP-based implementation with a Server to position articles and feedback output information. These plug-ins also carry out bi-directional communication to/fro with a WxWidgets-based client application.

Industry:
Publishing Business Domain Products
Technologies:
Adobe InCopy, XML-RPC, C++, Visual C++, CodeWarrior, MacOSX, WinXP, Perforce

This is an Adobe InCopy plug-in for updating files on the Server-side via XMLRPC (using xmlrpc-c). This involved working with Tags, XMP information handling etc. This plugin formed the basis of a Web-based Content Update Software.

Industry:
Architectural Design
Technologies:
C++, Acrobat  API,  MacOS X API

An Acrobat plug-in which allows architects and designers to download and save drawing in .DXF or .DWG format from Architectural Design Manual. We re-developed the plug-in with feature enhancements and bug fixes. The plug-in needed Acrobat 4/5 compatibility, and run native on MacOS X. Another requirement was to Reader-enable the plugin to work in Acrobat Reader.

Industry:
Publishing Software Development
Technologies:
C++, XML, HTTP, Windows, Mac OSX, InDesign CS2, CS3 SDK, QuarkXpress 6, 7 XDK

The objective of Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress Layout Converter/Exporter is to convert or export the Layout Contents and Geometry into XML format. It is to export layout contents like Text Story and Images in the current document along with their respective styles as XML. The Plug-in or XTension also provides a palette to display the list of tagged text and an interface to Tag or unTag the selected text or page-item.

Industry:
Publishing software
Technologies:
InDesign, Third Party Dictionaries/Libraries, Mac, Windows

1. Spell Checker is an InDesign plugin which provides enhanced spelling functionality. By using this engine user can spell check its text for wrong words, different grammatical errors and selects desired alternatives for its text. Alternatives are provided by third party library which acts as a dictionary for providing correct alternatives. In addition to enhanced spelling functionality for languages which are standard available in InDesign, it also introduces spelling functionality for other languages that are not available in standard InDesign.

2. Hyphenator is an InDesign plugin which provides hyphenation services to the publishing word. It introduces the intelligent syllable technology of third party to InDesign. It offers tremendous improvements to the standard hyphenation provided by InDesign and also adds a hyphenation support for various other languages which are not supported by standard InDesign. It provides facilities like what will happen to a word or paragraphs when next lines or space is provided abruptly. Text flow and white space will be improved dramatically by inserting hyphens at the correct locations.

Industry:
Publishing Software
Technologies:
InDesign, QuarkXpress, XML, Mac, Windows

Developed an InDesign CS3 and CS4 Plugin and QuarkXPress 8 Xtension. The Plugin/Xtension has a Tree Panel that shows the folders/files from the root directory. A folder can be expanded to see its files. The tree view is automatically refreshed at regular intervals. Preview of the selected file is shown in the panel.

We have implemented drag and drop functionalities where a user can drag and drop a file from the panel onto a document to place the file on the document. Further more a placed file can be dragged and dropped from a document onto a folder in the panel to add the file to the folder.

The Plugin/Xtension creates ID/QXP document as per the settings in a XML configuration file and also exports the document as EPS/PDF.

Industry:
Publishing Software
Technologies:
CS SDK, InDesign CS5, Flash Builder, Flex Framework, ActionScript, XML

Label plugin is created using Adobe Creative Suite SDK. CS SDK allows developers to use applications developed using Flex framework as CS5 plugins. The SDK also provides ActionScript libraries that can be used to easily integrate the extension with the host application by providing a mechanism to access the scripting Document Object Model (DOM) of the host CS5 application.

The purpose of the plugin is to set labels and related properties on various page-items in InDesign to categorize the items. For this the plugin has a Flash panel with the required fields. The plugin also lists the categorized items and allows you to change the label/properties. Further more the panel responds to selection change on the document.

Industry:
Publishing Software
Technologies:
InDesign, QuarkXPress, XML, Perl, AppleScript

iPrint allows a document to be used as a template for page production, with data taken from various sources, including web based CMS systems. A normal document is "tagged" using the "iPrint Tags" palette. The template is then placed in iPrint's template folder and, in this case using a control file, a series of pages can be generated using the template and data. The data stream is a series of key/value pairs retrieved through one or more data plugins.