See what's changed in each version of Sidekick.
We’ve enhanced our anonymous telemetry to better understand how Sidekick is performing. This helps us identify and fix issues faster, ensuring a smoother experience for everyone.
As always, telemetry contains no document content and can be disabled by asking your AI assistant to “disable Sidekick telemetry”.
You may have noticed that Claude (or your favorite AI assistant) sometimes needs a few tries to get things right in InDesign. We’ve added more guardrails to catch common mistakes before they happen.
The result: your AI assistant stays on track more often, so you spend less time waiting for retries and more time on your creative work.
Fixed an issue where the font metrics tool could fail to read your installed fonts. Claude can now reliably measure font characteristics like x-height and cap-height for precise text positioning.
Improved how Sidekick communicates with Claude Desktop to follow the latest MCP protocol standards. This fixes an error some users saw about “structured content” when using certain tools.
You can now place images directly into your InDesign documents. Just tell Claude (or any other AI assistant) where to find an image on your computer, and Sidekick will add it to your layout.
For example, you can say “Place the logo from my Desktop into the header” and Sidekick will create an image frame and insert your file.
Note: When you update the plugin, you’ll see a permission prompt asking for file system access. This is required so Sidekick can read image files from your computer.
Sidekick now sends anonymous error data when code execution fails in InDesign. This helps us identify and fix common issues that users encounter.
What’s captured: Error messages, code snippets (first 500 characters), and version information. No document content is ever captured, and all data is anonymous.
Easy opt-out: Just ask Claude to “disable Sidekick telemetry” and it will turn off error reporting.
You can now ask Claude about Sidekick’s settings using the new configuration tools. Currently this lets you view and toggle the telemetry setting, with more options planned for future releases.
When using refresh=true with the font metrics tool, the cache is now properly cleared. Previously, stale font data could persist even after requesting a refresh.
The Sidekick website now has a blog with articles about getting the most out of Sidekick. The first post covers how Sidekick can read font metrics that are normally inaccessible through InDesign scripting.
The font metrics feature introduced in v1.0.4 had an issue that prevented it from working in some environments. This has been fixed, so Claude can now reliably measure fonts for precise text positioning.
We’ve also added automated testing to catch similar issues before they reach you.
Claude can now read detailed font measurements like x-height, cap-height, ascender, and descender heights. This helps position text more precisely, especially when aligning text to baselines or creating typographic grids.
The connector supports fonts from your system fonts folder and Adobe Fonts. Font measurements are cached locally for faster lookups after the first scan.
When Sidekick downloads and applies an update while you’re working, you’ll now see a notification in Claude Desktop’s server panel showing the old and new version numbers. This keeps you informed about new features and fixes as they become available.
The Sidekick website now has a What’s New page showing user-friendly descriptions of each release. You’re reading it right now!
The connector now correctly signals that it provides tools dynamically. This improves compatibility with MCP clients that automatically discover available tools.
When Claude creates objects in InDesign (text frames, shapes, etc.), they now get meaningful names that appear in the Layers panel. This makes it easier to find and select objects that Sidekick created.
Previously, objects were named generically. Now they get descriptive names like “Header Text Frame” that tell you what they are.
Sidekick for InDesign is ready for production use. This release marks the first stable version of both the connector and the InDesign plugin.
With Sidekick, Claude can now control Adobe InDesign directly - creating documents, placing text, adjusting layouts, and more.