AE Bro: InDesign to After Effects, Without the Rebuild
A free After Effects panel I built that turns an InDesign document into animation-ready comps, one per page, with every shape and letter on its own layer.
Tools: After Effects / InDesign / ExtendScript
A lot of the motion work I do starts life as a layout. A designer builds the pages in InDesign, the client signs them off, and then someone has to bring all of it into After Effects so it can move. That someone is usually me, and for a long time it meant exporting PDFs or Illustrator files, fixing the colors, retyping text that came in as outlines and sorting through hundreds of unnamed layers before a single keyframe went down.
AE Bro is the tool I built to skip all of that. It’s a panel inside After Effects: you point it at an .indd file, click Build comps, and a minute or two later you have one comp per page, with every shape and every letter as a native, animatable layer.
What comes across
- Live text stays live. InDesign text frames become After Effects text layers with the same fonts, sizes, colors, tracking and line breaks, sitting on InDesign’s own baselines. If you’d rather animate letter by letter, it can convert text to shapes instead, with one shape per letter, grouped and named by word.
- Colors match. Everything is converted to sRGB through the document’s own CMYK profile, so what you see in After Effects matches InDesign’s own sRGB output.
- A swatch comp. The document’s named swatches, laid out as chips with their hex, RGB and original values, ready to pull colors from.
- Images come in clean. Placed images arrive as cropped, transparent PNGs at twice the resolution.
- Nothing is overwritten. The export runs on a temporary copy, so the original InDesign file is never touched.
Break apart, and back again
This is the part I use most. Select a layer and click Break apart, and every shape inside it becomes its own layer, in reading order, with its anchor point at its center and a label color for each word. It’s ready for Sequence Layers or an offset animation straight away.
Merge does the reverse: it folds those layers back into a single layer with a group per letter or per word, without moving anything on screen. So you can animate per letter while keeping the timeline tidy.
For the late changes
Clients update pages. The Pages field builds only the ones you need, for example 4, 9-12, and leaves the comps you’ve already animated alone.
Beyond After Effects
Not every job ends in After Effects, so AE Bro doesn’t assume it will. Export SVG saves each page as an SVG with every letter and shape as its own named path. Open it in Illustrator and the names are all there in the Layers panel. Import it into Blender and each letter arrives as its own curve, ready to extrude into 3D.
Get it
AE Bro is free and open source (MIT license). It works with After Effects and InDesign 2024 or newer, installed on the same Mac. Installation is one file dropped into After Effects’ ScriptUI Panels folder, and the GitHub page walks you through it step by step.
It reports anything it can’t convert exactly, such as drop shadows or gradients, rather than quietly getting it wrong. If you try it on a real job, I’d love to hear how it goes.