What it can do

Read and change your document, follow and undo each step, see and measure your pages, and save what works as an action.

Read and change your document

Your assistant works through InDesign’s scripting, so it can read your document and change what scripting reaches: styles, text, frames, tables, colours, pages, PDF export. It can’t change settings that scripting doesn’t reach.

Make every caption in my InDesign document italic.

The same caption twice: upright before the request, italic after it — The same caption, half a minute apart.

Follow along in InDesign

While your assistant works, the Sidekick panel says what it is doing, and where you would do the same by hand.

The Sidekick panel: setting the Caption paragraph style to Book Italic, and where to do the same in Paragraph Style Options — The Sidekick panel while the captions change.

Undo a change

Each change your assistant makes in the document is a step under Edit → Undo, with a name that says what it did. A small request is usually one step; a big one can be several. Save before a change across the whole document, and if you don’t like the result, use File → Revert.

Your assistant can still get things wrong, so look at the result before anything goes to print.

See your pages

Your assistant takes pictures of your pages, of spreads, or of a single object, sharp enough to check details. It uses them to check its own work, and shows you what it sees when you ask. In Claude Desktop, and other assistants that support it, the page appears in the chat, where you can zoom in with + or 1:1.

You type “Show me page 3.”, and Claude shows page 3 in a viewer in the chat, with buttons to zoom, and below it points out a caption that refers to a photo on another page — Page 3 in the chat. Looking at it, Claude spotted a caption that refers to a photo on another page.

More in Show, Don’t Tell and Sidekick Just Got a Loupe.

Measure the page and the type

Your assistant can read a page’s geometry: its size, margins, columns and frames. Sidekick also reads a font’s x-height and cap height from the font file, which InDesign doesn’t provide.

With those, your assistant can place things exactly against the type: two typefaces matched on x-height, a rule on the x-height, a photo’s top edge at the cap height. Name the line you mean and add “measured from the font”.

You ask “Make a type specimen of Signifier Light in a new InDesign document, with lines at the baseline, x-height and cap height, measured from the font itself.”, and Claude answers that it read them from the font file: x-height 448 and cap height 690 on a 1000-unit em, 53.76 pt and 82.80 pt at 120 pt

“Handgloves” in Signifier Light, with red lines at the cap height, x-height and baseline, each labelled with its value from the font — The H and the flat tops of the lowercase letters touch the red lines. Round letters overshoot slightly, as drawn.

More in Precise Typography with Font Metrics.

Save it as an action

When something works, ask your assistant to save it as an action. An action can have settings, such as a minimum resolution, and runs again from the chat or with one click in the Sidekick Actions panel (Plug-Ins → Sidekick → Sidekick Actions). Ask your assistant to list, show or delete your actions. To share actions with a team, ask your assistant to add a shared folder that everyone can reach.

Check my InDesign booklet for anything a printer would send back. Then save that check as an action called print check.

The Sidekick Actions panel in InDesign with Print check opened, showing its description and a Min ppi field — The check, saved as an action, with its Min ppi setting.

Use the built-in actions

Sidekick comes with four actions of its own, under Built-in in the Sidekick Actions panel: Alt text audit, Dutch typography, Overset hunt and Rich black sweep.

The Sidekick Actions panel with your own actions under Custom and Alt text audit, Dutch typography, Overset hunt and Rich black sweep under Built-in — Your own actions above, the built-in ones below.

More on one of them in Auditing Alt Text in InDesign, in One Pass.

Something this guide doesn’t answer? Write to [email protected]. A person answers.

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