LayoutBridge for Adobe InDesign®

InDesign® production with AI – local, without a plug-in, built on real magazine work

LayoutBridge connects your AI application to Adobe® InDesign® software: 110 tested tools with which Claude Desktop, Cursor or any other MCP client creates documents, flows in text, applies styles, places images, manages pages and exports print PDFs – on your computer, without a single document leaving the building.

Built from years of magazine production. The tools know type area and baseline grid, parent pages and bleed, widows and orphans, trim and bleed boxes when placing PDFs, image resolution and colour space. They report the page an object actually landed on, intercept InDesign® dialogs and return them as warnings – the things that improvised scripts stumble over.

What sets LayoutBridge apart

  • Production knowledge, not remote control. Tools for the whole workflow of a recurring publication: document and parent pages, paragraph and character styles, text flow across threaded frames, images and tables, guides and layers, typography check, packaging and PDF export.
  • 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®.
  • Mac and Windows. Tested with Adobe® InDesign® 2026 – version 21.5.1 on macOS®, version 21.6.0 on Windows 11 x64.
Documents and pagesParent pagesParagraph and character stylesText and text flowImages and linksTablesGuides, grids, layersSwatchesTypography checkPreflight, package, PDF

Price

Monthly subscription€29per month, net plus VAT · cancel monthly · 14-day free trial
Annual subscription€290per year, net plus VAT · two months free · cancel yearly

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; the licence key is shown immediately after purchase in the order confirmation and in the Polar customer portal. The licence terms of SP Medienservice apply to the software.

Buy via Polar

Requirements

  • Adobe® InDesign®, running – Mac or Windows (Windows 10/11 x64; tested with InDesign® 21.6.0 on Windows 11)
  • 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 keeps working for 14 days

Installation and licence key

LayoutBridge is obtained as the package layoutbridge-spm 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-spm-1.0.0.mcpb (version 1.0.0, 3.9 MB; SHA-256 4d432e9edd65959ec9808dc34f724d538714d6dff89f8751f781d97b2b2b3633). You store the licence key from the order confirmation in one of three ways – as the environment variable LAYOUTBRIDGE_SPM_LICENSE_KEY in the server's entry, as a file whose path is given in LAYOUTBRIDGE_SPM_LICENSE_FILE, or as the file license.key in the configuration folder (Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/layoutbridge-spm/, Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.layoutbridge-spm\).

When changing computers, release the licence on the old computer with npx layoutbridge-spm --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 110 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 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 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.

One release per month with a changelog; bug fixes are implemented as quickly as possible.

LayoutBridge is a product of SP Medienservice. Adobe® and InDesign® are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe in the United States and/or other countries. Mac®, macOS® and Apple Pay® are trademarks of Apple Inc. Microsoft, Windows® and PowerShell are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. Google Pay and YouTube are trademarks of Google LLC. Node.js is a trademark of the OpenJS Foundation. Claude is a name of Anthropic. Cursor, Codex, Polar, npm and all other product and company names mentioned are trademarks or names of their respective owners. All references serve solely to describe compatibility and distribution channels; there is no affiliation with, and no endorsement or sponsorship by, these companies.