Open Documents Manager

Getting started

Installing is a double click. The panel then lives in the Plug-Ins menu.

InDesign only shows your open documents as a list of names in the Window menu. That list tells you nothing useful. You cannot see which document is saved, which one has never been saved and is gone if InDesign crashes, how long it is or which folder it is in.

This panel puts every open document side by side and writes down, next to each of them, what you need to know. It is built for production work where ten to fifteen documents stay open at once — the same document from four different weeks, the price tags, a couple of spreads in progress.

Installing

1. Quit InDesign.
2. Double click the .ccx file. Creative Cloud installs it for you.
3. Start InDesign.

Where to find the panel

Plug-Ins → Zalesky Workflow → Open Documents Manager

or the shorter way: File → Open Documents Manager, directly under Open Recent. The panel puts that item there itself, every time InDesign starts — nothing to install and nothing to switch on.

Every plugin in this line collects under Zalesky Workflow. If you also have Smart Layers installed, you will see both entries in that submenu. The panel docks or floats, exactly like any other InDesign panel, and InDesign remembers its size and place.

Trial and licence

A free key gives you 14 days. A bought key lifts the limit.

The trial and the full version are the same plugin — there is nothing else to download. What tells them apart is the key you paste into Licence... in the panel menu. One box takes both kinds.

Nothing expires in a file you have already made. A PDF exported during the trial is a PDF.

Starting the free trial

1. Panel menu → Licence.... On a fresh install the panel opens this window for you.
2. Get the free 14-day trial, bottom left. The trial page opens in your browser. It costs nothing — the price is zero — but it goes through Gumroad, because Gumroad is what issues the key.
3. The key arrives in the receipt. Paste the whole line into Gumroad licence key and press Activate.

Buying, and your other computers

1. Buy the full version, bottom left in the same window.
2. Paste the key you get into the same box and press Activate. The limit is gone.

The same key activates your other computers. Install the plugin, open Licence..., paste the key, Activate. There is no second purchase, no file to carry across and nothing to free up first.

Without internet

A key is checked with Gumroad when you activate it. After that:

• a trial needs no internet at all — its last day is already known, and the panel counts it down by itself;
• a full licence works offline for 30 days from the last successful check, and is re-checked about once a day. When those 30 days are nearly out the panel says so at the bottom right, and all it wants is one moment online.

Where the key is kept

In InDesign's own secure storage for this plugin, with a spare copy of the key itself in the plugin's local data in case that secure store is ever lost — a Creative Cloud update or a new Windows profile can do it. The spare is only a key to try: it is checked online again before it counts for anything. It is not in prefs.json, so Export settings never carries your licence key into a file you send to a colleague.

The panel

A list, three rows of buttons, a status line. Nothing else.

• 1Filter and the view switch — list or page previews
• 2Column headings. Click to sort, drag the divider to resize, press it twice to fit
• 3The active document, in blue
• 4Button row one — works on the document
• 5Row two — closes what is selected
• 6Row three — closes everything open
• 7The status line. Long jobs report their progress here

The row

Eight things about every document.

Sorting and column widths

Click a column heading to sort. Click again for descending, a third time to go back to the default: the most recently opened document on top, the way File → Open Recent reads. Pinned documents always stay at the top, whatever the list is sorted by.

The divider between two headings is what you take hold of: drag it right and that column gets wider, and it thickens into the accent colour as the pointer passes over it. Press the same divider twice and the column fits itself to what is in it, the way a spreadsheet does. Every width is remembered, InDesign restart included.

The room the columns do not use is left empty at the end of the row, so the list never scrolls sideways. That also sets the limit: a column can be dragged as wide as the panel can hold, and to go wider than that you narrow another column first.

Folder is the one worth widening. Narrow, it shows the one folder the document sits in — which is the same word for every document in a job, week_39, week_39, week_39. Wider, it adds that folder's parent, then its parent, up to the whole path, so the column says which job each document belongs to.

The filter

Type part of a name in the box at the top. You can type several words — only documents containing all of them match.

State colours

Three colours, and all three are about risk, not decoration.

Red beats blue. A document that was never saved is the worse of the two: it exists nowhere but in memory, and no bulk action can save it without being told where it should go. If InDesign crashes, it is gone.

The St column sorts, and it sorts in exactly that order — never saved first, then unsaved changes, then saved. From the riskiest to the safest.

Marks on the right

The pin, and three warnings.

Mouse

Selection works like every list you already know.

Two views

A list, or previews of the first page. Like a folder window.

Two icons beside the filter switch between them, the way a folder window switches between details and medium icons. Previews earn their keep when every open name is a variation of the same document — four weeks of one job look identical in a list of names, and nothing alike as pictures.

Twelve buttons

Three rows, and the split means something.

Row two acts on the selection, row three on every open document. The difference between "close this" and "close the lot" should never be a modifier you have to remember — which is why each has a row of its own.

Row 1 — the document

Row 2 — closes what is selected

Row 3 — closes everything open

Modifier keys

Three keys, one meaning across the whole panel.

• AltDo it to everything, and stop asking
• ShiftLet me say more about it first
• CtrlThe sideways variant

Hold the key as you click the button. What each one does for each command is also in that button's tooltip.

The menu

What is not on a button.

The menu is the flyout at the top right of the panel, where every InDesign panel keeps it. The twelve buttons are not repeated there — a menu is for what you cannot already see.

Right click on a row

The short version for that document: Go to Page, Save a Copy, Revert, Export, Reveal, Copy name, Copy path, Select all, Package, Save set, Pin and Close. It opens at the pointer, like any context menu. With several documents selected, Go to Page is left out: going to a page in several documents at once is Sync Page.

Export

PDF, JPG, PNG and IDML — one of them, or all of them in one run.

Select the documents and click Export. The window is a tab per format: PDF, JPG, PNG and IDML. Tick the ones you want — several at once is the point, because the leaflet that goes to the printer as a PDF goes to the client as a JPG ten minutes later. A tick on the tab itself says a format is on, so the window can be read without opening every tab.

What each tab carries

PDF also has the preset and Create Separate PDF Files — ticked, it writes one PDF per page the way JPG and PNG do, and puts {page} into the file name so the pages cannot overwrite each other. JPG and PNG have Resolution (ppi), Quality, Colour, Anti-alias and Use the document bleed; PNG has Transparent background as well.

Spreads sits above the tabs, beside All pages and Range, and goes for every format at once: JPG and PNG write one image per spread, and a PDF is exported as spreads. With Create Separate PDF Files ticked as well, each spread is one PDF. A spread is named after its first page, so pages 2–3 come out as letak_02.

Fill these in for sets those boxes in one go — Web preview (96 ppi, RGB) or Print (300 ppi, with bleed). It fills them in; it does not lock them, so anything can still be changed afterwards.

File names

None of them has to be typed: the row of ticks under the box puts them in and takes them out, one tick per word, and a tick shows whether that word is in the pattern right now. A word put in this way brings one underscore with it, and only if there is not one there already — nothing comes out as name__01.

The patterns start plain: {name} for PDF and IDML, {name}_{page} for JPG and PNG. Page numbers come out as two digits — 01, 02, 03 — so ten pages sort as ten pages rather than 1, 10, 2; a page in a section keeps the name the Pages panel gives it, A-3 or iv.

JPG and PNG are written one file per page, which is what {page} and {dimensions} are for: a pattern without one of them would have every page overwrite the one before it. For PDF and IDML both are empty, and the separator left hanging on the end is trimmed off.

A pattern with no {name} in it — or, for JPG and PNG, no {page} and no {dimensions} — would write every file over the last one, so the window says so and exports nothing. Clearing the box puts that format's default pattern back.

When that name is already in the folder

It is not overwritten. The new file gets a suffix instead — _2, _3 and so on by default. That matters, because two documents can be open under one name when it is the same document from two different weeks, and without this the second export would quietly overwrite the first.

The suffix is yours, in Settings. It can contain:

Which pages

All pages or a Range, such as 1-3, 5 — the same for every format and every selected document, by page names as they read in the Pages panel. A document that does not have those pages is listed at the end, with the reason. With All pages chosen, the Pages to export box is greyed out and cannot be typed into; choosing Range opens it again, with what was in it.

The page range set in File → Export has no effect here and is left as you set it. Neither are your own JPEG and PNG export settings changed: every one the panel touches is read before the export and put back after it, even when the export fails.

Words of your own in a name

There is no separate box for them: whatever you want added goes into the pattern itself, where you can see where it lands. {name}_print_{page} gives leaflet_print_01.jpg, leaflet_print_02.jpg. Only the words in curly brackets are replaced; everything else is written out exactly as typed — and the ticks under the box put those words in, so the brackets are never typed by hand.

The clash suffix

The one suffix the panel adds by itself is in Settings → Export, _{n} by default. It is used only when a file of that name is already in the folder, and it goes on the end of the finished name — so with leaflet_print.pdf already there the next one is leaflet_print_2.pdf. With Overwrite files that are already there ticked it is not used at all.

That is what keeps two documents open under one name — the same document from two different weeks — from writing over each other.

How the window is laid out

At the top, side by side, loading a set of saved settings and saving this one under a name. Under them, what is true of every format: which pages, and what happens when it runs — whether files already there are overwritten, whether everything goes into one folder chosen now, and whether that folder opens at the end.

Under that, one tab per format, and each tab is two columns: on the left how that format is written — the PDF preset, the resolution, the colour, the ticks — and on the right what the files are called. Where they go sits under the name for JPG and PNG, and in the left column for PDF and IDML, which have less to set. No tab has to be scrolled; to move between formats, click its tab.

The line under the box

Under every File name box the window writes out what the file will actually be called — the finished name, the extension and all, worked out for the document you are about to export. A pattern is not a name, and {name}_{page} is not something anybody can read a result out of.

For a format that writes one file per page it shows the series: letak_01.jpg, letak_02.jpg, ... — so it is clear before you press Export that there will be many.

A second line appears when Overwrite files that are already there is off: already in the folder? then letak_2.pdf. That suffix lives in Settings, not in this window, and it is used only when a file of that name is already there — which is exactly why it is worth showing. It updates as you type and as you tick the words under the box.

Overwriting what is already there

Overwrite files that are already there replaces the files instead of giving the new ones a suffix. The box starts from the choice in Settings and counts for that export only, so overwriting once does not change what every other export does.

Never-saved documents

A document that has never been saved has no folder of its own, so nothing can go beside it. With the folder beside each document, the panel asks once where the files of never-saved documents go; the saved documents in the same export still go beside themselves. The window says so under the folder choice.

Doing the same export again

Type a name in Save these settings as and press Save settings at the bottom left: the whole window is kept under that name without exporting anything, and exporting keeps it too. The button says ✓ Saved for a moment, and the name is in Saved settings straight away. It then stands in the panel menu as Export: your name and exports in one click, with no window at all — one for the proof, one for the printer. Saved settings at the top of the window fills it back in from one of them; nothing is exported until you press Export. The window opens on the one you used last — picking another, running one from the panel menu, or saving settings under a name all change which that is.

To get rid of one, pick it in Saved settings and press Delete saved at the bottom left. The button turns into Click to confirm; a second click within four seconds deletes it and the button says ✓ Deleted. Nothing else is touched — the boxes in the window keep its values until you change them, so a preset deleted by mistake can be saved again on the spot.

Export again in the menu repeats the last export without asking and says what it was — Export again (PDF + JPG at 14:22). Holding Alt as you click Export does the same thing.

A different destination

Each tab can send its format to one fixed folder instead, or have the panel ask every time. For a one-off, tick Put everything in one folder, chosen now — or hold Shift as you click Export, which opens the window with that already ticked.

Exporting several large documents takes a while. The panel says which document it is on while it works.

More commands

The ones in the menu that open a window of their own.

Go to Page

You give the page name as it reads in the Pages panel, so sections work: iv and A-3 both resolve. A plain number is counted from the front of the document.

Sync Page

Puts every document on the same page. Flipping between revisions of the same document, you always land on the same spread instead of finding your way again in each document.

With two or more documents selected it acts on those; otherwise on all of them. A document shorter than the page you asked for lands on its last page. When it is done you are back in the document you started in, and the page field is ready to type into as soon as the window opens.

Snapshot — a dated copy

Saves a copy into a _snapshots folder beside the document, with the date and time in the name. Do it before starting anything that might not work out. The folder name is set in Settings.

Revert

Throws away unsaved changes and loads what is on disk again.

Package

Offers the same choices as File → Package, asks once, and applies them to every selected document. Each document gets its own subfolder. With several documents it takes a while, and the panel shows the progress.

Document sets

Remembers which documents you have open now, under a name you give it. Next time, open them all again at once. Useful for the combinations you open over and over — a whole weekly job, or the price tags for one promotion. The Save Set window opens with the cursor in the name box, and lists the sets you already have so you can write over one of them. Opening a set asks what should happen to the documents already open first: save and close them, close them without saving, or leave them alone. Pinned documents stay open either way.

Copy

To the clipboard: the name, the file path, the folder path, or the whole list as text, one document per line. Handy when you are telling someone what you are sitting on.

Document checks

Off by default, and that is deliberate.

The panel can watch four things: missing links, modified links, missing fonts and overset text. When a check finds something, an amber triangle appears on the row; hover it to see what.

So two settings hold it back:

At 0 the checks run only when you ask for them: Check selected documents in the menu. That command goes now, ignoring both the scope and the interval.

A document is only re-checked when its page count or its unsaved state has changed — otherwise the same answer would be computed over and over. While any checks are outstanding, the status line says how many are left.

Settings

Everything optional is here, and not on the panel.

Open it from the menu → Settings. It is a window of its own that can be dragged aside, and it scrolls. Changes are written when you click Save at the bottom; closing the window or clicking Cancel throws them away.

The reason even the switches that could sit on the panel are here is simple: the list is the panel. Every switch on its face is a row with a document you cannot see.

Appearance

View

Document checks

There is a chapter of its own on these. Here is only what each option sets.

Unsaved watchdog

Export

Formats, folders, resolution and file names are in the Export window, on the tab of the format they belong to — it opens on whatever you chose last time. What is here is true of every export.

Snapshots

Diagnostic log

Diagnostic log

Bulk actions

At the bottom of the window

The bottom of the window prints the full path to the folder all of this is saved in; the Open folder button that opens it is in the bottom left corner of the window, level with Cancel and Save. If InDesign asks for permission when you use it, that is normal — tick Remember my choice and click Allow.

Keyboard

Shortcuts you set yourself, in InDesign.

Your own shortcuts, anywhere in InDesign

The Plug-Ins → Zalesky Workflow submenu holds three commands with no window. They are there precisely so you can give them a keyboard shortcut in Edit → Keyboard Shortcuts, and that shortcut then works anywhere in InDesign, not only when the panel has focus.

Where the data lives

In the plugin's private folder, which survives an update.

prefs.json

Settings, sort order, pins, your own order, column widths

sets/

Document sets, one file each

thumbs/

Cached page previews

odm-log.txt

The diagnostic log for this run

odm-log-prev.txt

The run before it — after a crash, the one with the answer in it

Nothing is written next to the plugin itself, so reinstalling keeps your sets and pins. The full path is printed at the bottom of the Settings window, with an Open folder button in its bottom left corner.

Moving to another machine

The menu has Export settings and Import settings. The first writes the settings and the sets to one JSON file, the second reads them back. Carry the file across and import it.

When something goes wrong

Nine things that happen.

Activate says Gumroad could not be reached

The plugin asks api.gumroad.com over HTTPS and something in between said no — usually no connection, a VPN, or a studio proxy. Try again on a network that is not behind a filter. Your trial and your files are untouched by a failed check.

Activate says the key is not recognised

Three usual reasons. The key was pasted short — take the whole line, dashes included. Or it is the key for a different tool in the Zalesky Workflow line; each one has its own. Or the purchase was refunded.

The buttons are dimmed

There is no key in the panel, or the trial on the one there has run out. Every button dims then, because everything the panel does needs a key. Click one anyway — it opens the Licence... window, where the key goes, and a trial key is free. See Trial and licence.

The panel is not in the Plug-Ins menu

Check your InDesign version — it must be 18.5 or newer. Then quit InDesign, install the .ccx again and start it.

InDesign asks for permission when I open a folder

That is normal and not a fault. InDesign is asking whether the plugin may reach outside its own folder. Tick Remember my choice and click Allow — it will not ask again.

The Folder column is empty for one document

Either it is a document that has never been saved, and has no folder — or the panel has not resolved the path yet. Paths are fetched in the background and it fills itself in within a moment.

I changed a setting and nothing happened

Settings are only written when you click Save at the bottom of the Settings window. Closing the window or clicking Cancel throws the changes away.

InDesign crashed, or went slow, and I was not even using the panel

That is what the diagnostic log is for. Panel menu → Open diagnostic log. Two files sit in that folder: odm-log.txt is the run you are in now, and odm-log-prev.txt is the one before it — after a crash that is the one to read.

A line starting with > is something the panel was about to ask InDesign; the < under it is that call coming back. A > with no < after it is the call that did not return, and the new log says so at the top so you do not have to look for it. The lines marked . are a heartbeat every half minute: the last one before a gap is when the panel was still alive.

Three things the panel does on its own, in the order they are worth suspecting: the document checks walk every link and text frame and are the slowest; page previews in the grid view are a real export of each document; and the unsaved watchdog can save. Each has a switch in Settings, and the log names whichever one it was.

The panel feels slow

Almost certainly the document checks are on over a wide scope. Open Settings, the Document checks section, and set Minutes between checks to 0. The checks then run only when you ask for them. The other suspect is page previews on large documents.