Smart Layers

The palette

Everything the Layers panel does, within reach of the hand already on the mouse.

Hold Ctrl+Alt and roll the wheel anywhere in InDesign. The card opens with the cursor resting on its header, so the wheel and every button are live immediately — no travelling across the screen to a docked panel. It closes as soon as the mouse leaves it, unless you pin it.

Anatomy of a row

Seven things per layer, all of them live.

• EyeBright when the layer is visible, dim when hidden. Click to toggle, Alt+click to isolate.
• PadlockAmber when locked, pale when not. Click to toggle, Alt+click to invert every layer.
• Colour barThe layer colour from InDesign's own Layers panel. Click it to select everything on that layer, Shift+click to add it to the selection.
• NameClick to send the selected objects here. Drag to reorder the layer.
• SwatchClick it to pick a different layer colour from the full InDesign palette.
• CountsHow many objects the layer holds: on the spread you are looking at, then in the whole document, masters included. The second number only appears when it differs from the first. Counted the way a selection sees the page — a group is one object, a frame with a placed graphic is one, and anchored objects belong to their text frame. Click to select them. They can be switched off in Settings, which also stops the counting and makes the card quicker on a long document.
• Selection markerThe small white square at the very end, black in the light theme: some of what is selected sits on this layer. Unlike InDesign’s own dot it appears on every layer holding part of the selection, not just one. Click it to select everything on that layer.

The right click menu

Right click any row for the things that belong to that one layer — Rename, Delete layer, Select all objects on this layer — and, when more than one layer is ticked, Merge them. Underneath sit the three tools that work on the whole stack: Sort objects into layers, Layer templates and Visibility sets, so you can reach them without going up to the menu.

Controls

The wheel browses; holding Shift is what actually moves your artwork. Nothing in the document changes until you ask for it.

Opening it

On the card

States

The card tells you what it is about to do before you commit.

The menu

Everything that needs more than a click, behind the icon on the right of the header.

Every one of these lands as a single undo step, so Ctrl+Z takes back the whole operation, not one layer at a time.

Layer templates

The layer structure you use on every job, rebuilt in one click.

A template is a list of layer names and colours, top to bottom. Apply it to a document and the layers appear in that order, in those colours. Layers that already exist are reused rather than duplicated, so running a template twice is harmless — and on a fresh document the single empty default layer is recycled as the bottom one instead of being left behind.

Build one in the editor, or take a document you have already set up and save its structure with Save current layers as template. Templates are shared by every document.

Visibility sets

Snapshots of what is shown and what is hidden.

Set the document up the way you want to see it, then save that state under a name. Restoring it later puts every layer back. Sets are matched by layer name, so they keep working after layers are reordered or new ones are added — anything the set does not mention is left alone.

Unlike templates, sets belong to the document they were made in, which is what you want for print-versus-preview or language variants of the same job.

Sorting objects by type

Hand a messy document a structure without touching a single frame by hand.

Two ways round it. Either you say where each kind of object belongs and nothing else happens, or you let it make the layers and work out the order between them by itself. The switch at the top of the dialog picks which.

Let me choose the layers

Nothing is created and nothing moves unless you ask. Anything left on leave where it is is not touched at all, which makes it safe to sort just the photos today and come back for the rest tomorrow.

By object style

Four rules sit above the table: object style → layer. They are checked first, before anything is judged by its type, because a style is a decision you made and a type is only an observation. If your price boxes carry the object style cena, one rule files every one of them onto CENY, whatever they happen to be made of.

By type

What decides is the file extension of the placed graphic, not the class InDesign reports. That matters: InDesign calls a placed .ai a PDF, and a .psd and a .tif plain images, so going by class alone cannot tell apart the things you tell apart at a glance.

Groups

Groups are never broken up. A group moves as one thing, so instead of one Group row there are eight, and a group is filed by what it carries — looked at all the way down, through nested groups as well.

Do it for me

Everything else greys out, because there is nothing left for you to set. It makes the layers it needs — TEXT, VECTORS, IMAGES, GROUPS, SHAPES, LINES, OTHER — and only the ones something actually turned up for. A layer of that name already in the document is reused, not duplicated.

The interesting part is the order it puts them in. Grouping objects by type must break some overlaps: if a caption sits above photo A and below photo B, and both photos end up on one layer, one of the two has to give. So instead of guessing, it measures the document — for every pair of overlapping objects on a spread it notes which kind was on top — and then tries all 5040 arrangements of the seven layers and keeps the one that breaks the fewest overlaps. Exact, not a guess. Where the measurements tie, it falls back to the order a person would have drawn: text on top, then vectors, images, shapes, and the rest underneath.

Only objects on the same spread can overlap, so the comparison stays inside a spread. On a catalogue the all-pairs version would run for minutes and reach the same answer.

Scope, and objects beside the pages

Selected objects carries a live count, and it keeps looking while the dialog is open — select something in InDesign now and the number follows. Scraps and old versions usually live on the pasteboard, and filing them into production layers helps nobody, so they are left alone unless you tick Also the pasteboard. That tick applies to the whole-document scope: when you select objects yourself, everything you selected is processed, pasteboard or not.

What happens to stacking

The front-to-back order is read before anything moves, and inside every target layer the objects are laid down back to front, so their order relative to each other survives intact. What does change is what follows from the order of the layers themselves: an object sent to a lower layer ends up behind the ones above it. That is the point of sorting, and it is the only thing that shifts.

Objects anchored in text move with their frame, and objects inside a group move with the group. Neither is filed on its own — that would break the layout rather than tidy it.

Settings

One dialog, everything in view.

• ThemeDark or light. The dialog repaints itself along with the card, so you see the whole thing in the new colours at once.
• Palette size100 % to 200 %. Everything scales together — see Size on big screens.
• RowsHow many layers the card shows, 3 to 25. The same thing as dragging the bottom edge, for when you want an exact number.
• New layersThe word new layers are named after. Type vrstva and they become vrstva 1, vrstva 2… The line underneath spells out what you will get as you type.
• Show the object countsThe two numbers on every row. Switching them off does more than hide them: the document is never asked for the counts at all, which is the slowest part of a refresh on a long catalogue.
• Export / ImportTemplates, visibility sets and these settings, in one text file — see Taking it with you.
• Data folderOpens the folder where all of it lives, next to the script.

Themes

Dark by default, light for the people who work that way.

Both live in Menu → Settings, together with the size. Pick one and the card repaints at once — and so does the Settings dialog itself, so you are never left judging a new theme through a window still wearing the old one.

Settings → Theme. The choice is remembered, and the dialogs follow it too, so the whole thing stays one piece.

Size on big screens

A card sized for a laptop turns into a postage stamp on a 4K or 6K screen. Settings → Palette size scales the whole thing to 120, 140, 160, 180 or 200 percent — text, icons, swatches and spacing together, so it stays proportional. It takes effect the moment you pick it, so you can see what you are choosing, and it is remembered like the theme.

Installing

One folder, one script to run.

Windows

Keep every file of the package together in one folder. Install AutoHotkey v1.1, then run Smart_layers.ahk — an icon appears in the tray. Put a shortcut to it in your Startup folder if you want it there every morning. (Compiled to an .exe it runs without AutoHotkey installed, but the package ships the script.)

Open InDesign, select something, hold Ctrl+Alt and roll the wheel once. Run only one copy at a time — two of them would fight over the same shortcut.

macOS

AutoHotkey does not exist on macOS, so the overlay is drawn by InDesign itself. Copy the folder into the Scripts Panel folder, then assign shortcuts in Edit → Keyboard Shortcuts with the Product Area set to Scripts, to Layer UP.jsx and Layer DOWN.jsx.

You get moving, clicking and the lock markers. Wheel browsing, dragging, the filter and the menu are Windows only — they belong to the overlay, not the document side.

Files & data

Two halves: one draws, the other talks to InDesign.

The overlay handles the shortcut and paints the card. Every actual change to the document is done by a small ExtendScript launcher, all of which share one core file. The two halves pass state through a temp file, which is why scrolling and selecting feel instant — the whole layer list is fetched once and then lives in the overlay.

Smart_layers.ahk

The overlay: shortcut, drawing, menus, dialogs

_layerhud_core.jsx

All the document logic, shared by every launcher

Layer UP.jsx · Layer DOWN.jsx

The two scripts you can also bind directly in InDesign

_layerhud_*.jsx

One small launcher per action — move, lock, reorder, template, sort…

data/

Everything the palette needs and everything it saves: the launchers in data/jsx, plus templates, visibility sets, colour swatches and preferences

Taking it with you

Settings → Export writes your templates, sets and preferences into a single text file; import reads it back and tells you what it found before it does anything. That is the way to move a setup to another machine, or to hand your layer structure to a colleague.

Troubleshooting

Everything else worth changing — sizes, colours, fonts, timings, which gestures are on — sits in the configuration block at the top of the script, in plain English with a comment on each line.