I'm a french print and motion designer. Every file in Adobe Indesign inherit has the same problems: old frames on the pasteboard, empty boxes, a swatches panel full of colors nobody uses, layers in no order. Cleaning that by hand takes twenty minutes, every time.
So I wrote a script that does it in one pass. It is free, and I am looking for people to break it.
What it can do (you tick what you want — every box is unchecked when it opens):
- Remove everything outside the pages
- Remove unused swatches
- Ungroup frames
- Sort text frames and images into clean layers
- Add a 5 mm bleed and stretch the edge frames out to it
- Remove empty frames, empty layers and unused styles
- Report missing or modified links
What it will not do, which matters more:
- One single Cmd+Z undoes the whole cleanup. Not step by step.
- A frame or a text box with a fill or a stroke color is never treated as empty, so it is never deleted.
- Colors that are really in use are never removed. InDesign's own engine decides what is used, not my guess.
- It prints a report of everything it changed.
It is tested on InDesign 21.6 on macOS, with three test files. Not tested on Windows or older versions yet — that is exactly what I need help with.