At my last job, I was the go-to guy if my colleagues needed an InDesign Javascript or piece of GREP code. Must admit that it was nice to be wanted… until things became busy, and then it could be frustrating. However, it gave me an opportunity to prepare several scripts for the company, as well as inspiration for scripts that later became Colecandoo staples such as the yearly planner script.

Since taking on my new role at Newstyle Print, much more of my time is spent preflighting artwork and preparing sheet impositions for our offset presses (including a massive A1 ten colour press), so haven’t had the need to dive into scripting much.

That said, at the beginning of 2025 I was alerted to an innovation from Omata Labs called Omata Mate. It’s a plug-in for InDesign that integrates with various AI/LLMs directly without leaving InDesign.

Here we go…

Now that I’ve said AI/LLMs, don’t click off in fear thinking “not another person jumping on the AI bandwagon!”. I’ll admit that I’d dabbled with ChatGPT to attempt to create InDesign Javascripts and often found myself banging my head against a wall in frustration as it assured me the script would work, and then an error would be thrown, I’d inform it of the error, it would be apologetic and insist this version would work… rinse and repeat…

But one thing about Omata Mate had my attention – the users singing its praises. They were fellow Adobe Community Experts, well known scripters in the InDesign community such as Marc Autret of Indiscripts (check out his interview with Omata founder Eugen Pflüger here), so I felt it was worthy of a look… but a typo on their website in the worst possible place had put me off, especially as it is a paid plug-in.

Several months passed, and with more and more InDesigners giving it the thumbs up, I felt that it deserved another chance, so I invested in a year-long subscription and downloaded the plug-in… and can now see what the hype was about. The creator also recently presented Omata MATE at the LA InDesign User Group (the video is here, the MATE part starts 24 mins in) that will go into more detail than this article.

Blown away

Unlike many other plug-ins or scripts for InDesign that are limited in scope to what they can accomplish, this can literally do whatever you ask within InDesign’s capabilities, provided that the prompt is clear and interpreted correctly. Fellow InDesigner Branislav Milić said it best in one of his many posts on X:

“MATE for InDesign – Stuff done in a split second because the feature is missing in InDesign”.

Another handy feature is that successful requests that are made in MATE can also be added to a library so that it can be used again, without having to remember the exact prompt to type in to achieve that result. Similarly, if a result didn’t go to plan, the user can ask MATE to fix the issue (provided an appropriate prompt is used to explain the issue). Scripts made by MATE can also be exported as jsx files for later use.

Compliment, not substitute

In my own experience, I used MATE to assist me to create a script to generate panel layouts for brochures. Preparing brochure layouts is something that I’ll usually do manually, but with a tool like MATE just begging to be used, why not use it?

I’ve created a UI using Joonas’ creator that I’d like to use.

What Joonas’ creator won’t do is the behind-the-scenes calculations that make the user interface functional, but that’s where Omata MATE comes in. Rather than type one massive prompt for MATE to try and digest and work into a script, I’m going to take Creator Eugen’s advice and break this up into smaller parts. The first part is to prepare the Z-fold configuration as it’s the easiest to explain and for MATE to make a UI for.

I then run the script… and it is sort of correct, but it has swapped out millimetres (used here in Australia) for points… this is a common issue with InDesign scripts. I then debug the script with further prompts until the script is behaving the way I would like.

It does get to a point where the script wouldn’t add guidelines like I wanted, but again this was a matter of breaking this into smaller tasks. I asked in a separate request to make a guideline, and then copied that part of the script into the one it had created and the script now worked as intended.

Limited to the constraints of InDesign

As great as this plug-in is, it is only as good as the software that it’s working within. For example, take the long-standing bug of anchored objects not being able to text wrap the first line in the paragraph its anchored to. Omata MATE won’t be able to overcome this limitation of InDesign, this is still something for the InDesign developers to fix.

Likewise, if you want to add rounded corners to a table (link to request) again Omata MATE won’t be able to do this as InDesign doesn’t support rounded corners in tables… again this another one for the InDesign devs.

Overall, it gets the chef’s kiss!

At the time of writing this article, there are three implementations of AI natively within InDesign

• Generative expand (that needs work – see Mike Rankin’s article over at CreativePro)
• text to image, allowing Adobe’s Generative AI to add images directly within InDesign;
• the auto styles feature.

In my opinion, this is the best implementation of AI I’ve seen for InDesign so far. I’d also go as far to say it’s the best new feature I’ve seen added to InDesign for the last ten years, and it was added by Omata – a third party developer, rather than the Adobe InDesign development team. If the InDesign devs are reading this, pay attention to this fabulous innovation and follow in Eugen’s footsteps. Eugen, if you are reading this, well done!

Usual Declaration

This article has not been paid for in any way, shape or form by Omata, nor have they reached out to me to write this article, or compensated me in any other way. I have my own subscription to the Omata MATE service that I have paid.