LayoutBridge Light for Adobe® InDesign®

What sets LayoutBridge Light apart

• Built for the book. Document with trim size and bleed, type area, parent pages, sections, autoflow of the manuscript, paragraph and character styles, text variables for running heads, table of contents and index, one-piece cover with the spine width from page count and paper thickness, check against the requirements of a print-on-demand service, export as print PDF and as EPUB with a check of the EPUB.
• Local. The server runs on your computer and talks to Adobe® InDesign® directly. Your documents are never uploaded; the only network connection is the licence check.
• No plug-in. Nothing is installed inside InDesign®. On the Mac®, access runs via AppleScript; on Windows® via COM.
• Any MCP client. Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor and other applications that support the Model Context Protocol.
• Defined results. Every tool answers in a fixed result format – ok, warnings, error kind, identifiers of the changed objects – and is covered by unit tests and an integration suite against a running InDesign®. The server code is the same as in LayoutBridge.
• Mac and Windows. Tested with Adobe® InDesign® 2026 – version 21.6.0.57 on macOS®. The same server code runs on Windows 10/11 x64; LayoutBridge Light itself has not yet been tested there.

What is not included – and when LayoutBridge is the better choice

LayoutBridge Light contains 77 of the 123 tools of LayoutBridge for Adobe® InDesign®. Not included are:

• Tables – creating, filling and formatting tables
• Layers, groups and object styles
• Shapes and effects – ellipses, polygons, lines, corner options, gradient swatches, effects such as drop shadows, converting text to outlines
• Magazine layout – reordering pages and moving them to new spreads, moving objects to other pages, rotating, stacking and aligning them, listing and deleting guides, reading and setting the selection
• Taking over third-party documents – replacing fonts and swatches, embedding, unembedding, deleting and relinking links, listing objects on the pasteboard, packaging the document

A few further tools are left out because book typesetting solves the task another way – for instance creating a frame anew instead of duplicating it, a parent page of its own for chapter openings instead of overriding single parent items, styles from the book template instead of a style import. The tool reference shows which tools are included.

For magazines, catalogues and brochures, for books with tables and for work on third-party documents, LayoutBridge is the product designed for the job. The two products have separate licences: a key for LayoutBridge does not unlock LayoutBridge Light, and vice versa. There is no upgrade discount – to switch, you take out a LayoutBridge subscription, set up its package and cancel LayoutBridge Light in the Polar customer portal.

Price

There is no free trial. One licence covers exactly one workstation. For further workstations you purchase further licences. The offer is directed exclusively at businesses (entrepreneurs within the meaning of § 14 of the German Civil Code), legal entities under public law and special funds under public law.

Purchase, payment, invoicing and cancellation are handled by Polar (Polar Software, Inc., USA), which acts as the seller. Payment by card, Apple Pay® or Google Pay; you find the licence key immediately after purchase in the Polar customer portal; the order confirmation email contains the link to it (“Access purchase”). The licence terms of SP Medienservice apply to the software.

Buy LayoutBridge Light

At Polar you choose between the monthly subscription (€9.90 net) and the annual subscription (€99 net).

Requirements

• Adobe® InDesign®, running – Mac or Windows (Windows 10/11 x64)
• Node.js version 20 or later – only for setup via npm and for other MCP clients; not needed with the installation package for Claude Desktop
• Windows: Windows PowerShell 5.1 (powershell.exe, included in Windows) – access to InDesign® runs through it via COM
• An AI application with MCP support, for example Claude Desktop, Claude Code or Cursor, with your own account
• A network connection for the licence check – on the first call and thereafter at most once every 24 hours; without a network, LayoutBridge Light keeps working for 14 days

Installation and licence key

LayoutBridge Light is obtained as the package layoutbridge-light via npm and registered as a server in your MCP client; for Claude Desktop there is also a downloadable bundle file (.mcpb) that takes care of the entry: layoutbridge-light-1.0.0.mcpb (version 1.0.0, 4.0 MB; SHA-256 ced4790c1a6ae15a88995c5f4aa510a525934115dafe9f09e94ab053cb59840a). You store the licence key from the Polar customer portal (“LayoutBridge Light licence key”, starting with LBL) in one of three ways – as the environment variable LAYOUTBRIDGE_LIGHT_LICENSE_KEY in the server's entry, as a file whose path is given in LAYOUTBRIDGE_LIGHT_LICENSE_FILE, or as the file license.key in the configuration folder (Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/layoutbridge-light/, Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.layoutbridge-light\).

The server checks the key with the Polar licence service on the first tool call and thereafter at most once every 24 hours. If the service cannot be reached, LayoutBridge Light keeps working for 14 days from the last valid check (grace period). It writes logs on your computer to ~/Library/Logs/layoutbridge-light/ (Mac) or %USERPROFILE%\.layoutbridge-light\logs\ (Windows); text from your documents and the licence key are never recorded.

When changing computers, release the licence on the old computer with npx layoutbridge-light --deactivate; the same key can then be set up on the new computer. The step-by-step guide – including a copy-and-paste instruction that lets your AI do the setup – is available now, as are the tool reference covering all 77 tools and the page on the licence key (activation, grace period, moving computers, logs).

What leaves your computer – and what doesn't

Your documents, images and texts stay on your computer; LayoutBridge Light sends none of them to us or to third parties. For the licence check, the software transmits the licence key and a random workstation identifier to Polar's licence service – no computer name, no user name. No usage measurement, no version check, no error reports. Please note: whatever your AI application receives from LayoutBridge Light is processed under the rules of your AI provider. Everything else is in the privacy policy for the software.

Support

Questions and error reports to kontakt@mcp-interfaces.com. We answer on working days, aiming for a reply within two working days. Helpful: tool name, the error text verbatim, time, InDesign® version and operating system. Never send us your licence key.

Bug fixes are implemented as quickly as possible.