A Script to Show Overridden Items in InDesign

Generally speaking, InDesign's scheme for handling master page items works very well for most users. It gives you the flexibility to locally override some aspects of master page items (like position, stroke/fill, etc) while leaving other aspects controlled by the master page until you specifically override them. It's the best of both worlds; you have global control over formatting that hasn't been changed locally.

But there is at least one way in which master page items could be improved: there's no way to tell which master items have been overridden just by looking at them. So you might make changes on a master page and unexpectedly have those changes not reflected in your document pages. This could be especially annoying (and time-consuming) to deal with in a long document.

Wouldn't it be handy if InDesign applied some kind of label to overridden master items on your document pages? Unfortunately, it doesn't. But now thanks to Marijan Tompa, there's a script that reveals overridden master items!

The script is called tomaxxiMARK-UP, and you can download it (and plenty of other cool scripts) at Marijan's website, tomaxxi.com.

The script applies XML tagging to overridden master items, and thus gives you two ways to spot them. First, when you run the script, you can see overridden items highlighted with the color of the XML tag.


You can change the color of the highlighting if you want, by double clicking on the _Overridden_ tag in the Tags panel and choosing a new color.

You can also see all the overridden items in a document in the Structure pane (choose View > Structure > Show Structure, or press Cmd+Opt+1/Ctrl+Alt+1). You will see items listed with the _Overridden_ tag and you can double click on each one to navigate to it in the document.

Obviously, you wouldn't want to use this script if XML tagging and structure are part of your workflow. But for the vast majority of users, the use of XML tags won't cause any problems whatsoever.