Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to figure out what was different, if anything, between two look-alike documents? Maybe you've got two differently-named files that look the same; but you want to make sure they're exactly the same before you toss one. Or you need to check that copy edits were made, and nothing else, between the "almost final" version of a page layout file sitting on your hard drive and the "final" version your freelancer just delivered.

If you're dealing with long documents, this task can be onerous. Even comparing a couple short ones -- line by line, break by break -- can be a pain.

InDesign CS users, did you ever wish ID could create crop marks around a selection? Export all the stories in a document to text files with one click? Do Illustrator effects like Punk, Bloat and Twirl? Fill a frame with a bunch of shapes, all randomly sized, filled, stroked and rotated? Clean up a text file? Automatically add ruler guides around the edges and center point of a frame? Change an ellipse to a rectangle and vice versa?

No need to file a feature request, it already can do all these things, and a few more. Just open InDesign's Scripts palette (Window -> Scripting -> Scripts) and double-click the script that provides the feature.

Bumming around the Apple site the other day, I noticed that there's two recently-revised "Technology Tour" papers (aka "Manuals We Should Have Included") of interest to designers working in OS X:

Color Management with OS X Panther (June 2004)
http://images.apple.com/pro/pdf/Color_Management_in_Mac_OS_X.pdf

Advanced Typography with Mac OS X: Using and Managing Fonts (July 2004)
http://images.apple.com/pro/pdf/L303878A_Font_TT_v3.pdf