Built by someone who was doing it by hand

Why DriveSync exists

It started with an annual report. A hundred and forty pages, written by a dozen people in Google Docs, typeset in InDesign by one person over three weeks. The layout was finished and it was good.

Then the copy changed. Not all of it — a paragraph here, a figure there, two new rows in a table on page 88. And because there was no way to bring those changes across without losing the styling, the work was to find each edit, copy it, paste it, and re-apply the paragraph style by hand. A day and a half. Nothing about the document was better at the end of it than at the start; it was simply correct again.

That happened four more times before the report went to print.

The fifth time, the question stopped being how long will this take and became why is this a thing anyone does. InDesign has a scripting engine. Google has an API. The only reason the two do not meet in the middle is that nobody had put them there. DriveSync is what came of putting them there.

What it refuses to do

Most of the work in a tool like this is not in moving text. It is in deciding what to leave alone.

An early version matched paragraphs by position — first paragraph to first paragraph, second to second. It worked beautifully until a writer added a sentence at the top, at which point every heading in the document took the style of the paragraph above it. That version was thrown away. Matching by content is slower to compute and considerably harder to get right, and it is the reason DriveSync can be pointed at a live document without flinching.

The same reasoning shows up everywhere in the product. Images are placed once and then frozen, because artwork you positioned by eye should not move because a caption got longer. Table cells are rewritten in place rather than rebuilt, because you narrowed that column for a reason. And a sync that would replace most of a long story stops and asks, because the alternative is a plugin that quietly destroys three weeks of typesetting and reports success.

What we have not built

DriveSync is not a collaborative editor and is not going to become one. There is no live cursor, no merge of simultaneous edits, no API, no headless mode. Those are real products, and they are not this one.

We would rather ship a small tool that does one job exactly than a large one that does six jobs approximately. If you are evaluating DriveSync and the thing you need is on that list, it is better for both of us that you find out here rather than on day nine of a trial.

How we work

DriveSync is a small operation. The person who answers your email is the person who wrote the code, which means bug reports land where they can be acted on and nobody has to be escalated to. It also means there is no sales team, no call to book and no demo to sit through — the trial is the demo, on your document.

There are no customer logos on this website because printing logos you have not been given permission to print is a habit we would rather not start. When there are customers happy to be named, they will appear here in their own words.

What we are working on

DriveSync is at build 2.14.6, supporting Adobe InDesign 2026 on macOS and Windows. The next commitment is InDesign 2027 support, released as a free update when Adobe ships it — which is the one promise on this website about the future, and it is deliberate.

After that, the roadmap is mostly made of things customers have run into on real documents. That is the honest answer, and it is a better one than a list of features written by someone guessing.