By Dale Farris, Vice President
Golden Triangle PC Club
July 2004

Adobe InDesign CS software combines extraordinary production power and creative freedom to take page design to a new level. InDesign is a high-end, professional application used for layout and design of all sorts of projects.

In the world of desktop publishing, today's software spans the continuum, from those brand new to designing pages with an interest in inexpensive programs, to professionals highly trained to use complex features in very expensive applications. Microsoft's Publisher represents desktop software that novices will appreciate, while Adobe's InDesign CS is targeted toward the professional market. At the high end of the design and layout software market, InDesign mainly competes with QuarkXPress, and both are not for novices. However, InDesign CS will most definitely appeal to these highly skilled and trained professionals, providing tools and features that go beyond the more limited tools found in entry level applications.

InDesign CS combines extraordinary production power and creative freedom to take page design to a new level. With InDesign CS, you can produce pages quickly and output them reliably. Its intuitive creative toolset helps you refine design ideas rapidly. The ability to import native Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files saves significant production time. Plus, InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator software share a standard Adobe interface, so you can get up to speed quickly and work more efficiently with tightly integrated tools.

InDesign CS Features

Assemble pages quickly, output them confidently

Separations Preview palette - Prevent printing errors by using the Separations Preview palette to preview plates, overprinting, ink limits, and more.

Story Editor - Edit and style text in the Story Editor, an integrated word processor that helps you more efficiently handle text spanning multiple frames.

Robust cross-media support - Publish content to multiple channels more easily with enhanced XML support.

Nested styles - Perform complex text formatting more efficiently with nested styles. For example, specify a unique drop cap font with a character style nested within a paragraph style.

Improved performance - Enjoy faster screen redraw and overall responsiveness when zooming, scrolling with the Hand tool, importing Adobe Photoshop files, wrapping text, printing, and exporting Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

Unlimited undos - Experiment freely and retrace unlimited steps using the Undo and Redo commands.

Flexible workspace management - Take advantage of numerous workspace enhancements, such as the new Control palette and custom workspaces, to tailor your work environment to your needs.

Transparency - Apply editable drop shadows, feathering, and other transparency settings. Maintain soft edges when placing transparent Photoshop files.

Tables - Import styled Microsoft Word and Excel tables or tab-delimited text files, and then refine them with table formatting such as color fills in alternating rows.

Advanced typographical controls - Produce professional typography with ease using the Paragraph Composer, optical kerning and margin alignment, dynamic text preview, and other advanced type features.

Enhanced support for Photoshop (PSD) files - Place and print native Photoshop CS files, including duotones, tritones, and quadtones, as well as PSD and TIFF files that contain spot channels.

Native Illustrator file support - Import native Adobe Illustrator files or copy and paste them into InDesign as editable objects.

Direct export of Adobe PDF files - Export Adobe Acrobat 6, 5, and 4 files directly from InDesign for electronic reviews and high-end printing. Maintain layers in exported Acrobat 6 files.

Package for GoLive command - Easily repurpose InDesign layouts and assets for reuse as Web pages with the new Package for GoLive command.

Adobe InCopy CS integration - Set up true parallel workflows between designers and editors with Adobe InCopy CS software, a professional writing and editing program that integrates tightly with InDesign.

Top Ten New Features

Separations Preview palette - Prevent printing errors by using the Separations Preview palette to preview plates, overprinting, ink limits, and more.

Story Editor - Edit and style text in the Story Editor, an integrated word processor that helps you more efficiently handle text spanning multiple frames.

Flexible workspace management - Take advantage of numerous workspace enhancements, such as the new Control palette and custom workspaces, to tailor your work environment to your needs.

Enhanced support for Photoshop (PSD) files - Place and print native Adobe Photoshop CS files, including duotones, tritones, and quadtones, as well as PSD and TIFF files that contain spot channels.

Usability enhancements - Work more efficiently with dozens of usability enhancements. For example, double-click a text frame to switch instantly to the Type tool.

Nested styles - Perform complex text formatting more efficiently with nested styles. For example, specify a unique drop cap font with a character style nested within a paragraph style.

Running headers and footers in tables - Automatically add running headers and footers to tables that run across multiple linked text frames.

Stroke style editor - Create and save striped, dotted, and dashed stroke styles and apply them to underlines and strikethroughs, as well as to lines and paragraph rules.

Enhanced XML support - Automatically style imported XML documents or add structure to formatted content by mapping XML tags to paragraph and character styles, or vice versa.

Document presets - Save your commonly used document settings, such as page size, columns, margins, and bleed and slug areas, as named presets that you can instantly apply to new documents.

InDesign CS Features Surpass QuarkXPress

The attractive pricing of Adobe Creative Suite should help InDesign CS compete well with QuarkXPress. This release of InDesign CS adds a context-sensitive control panel (also known as a measurements palette) that will make longtime QuarkXPress users feel comfortable. However, designers may choose InDesign for the ways in which it surpasses Quark, including its cutting-edge typography and integration with other Adobe applications.

This release turbocharges InDesign's typographic functions with nested paragraph styles. Think of a nested style as a paragraph style that knows how to apply unique character-level formats to specific parts of a text block, letting designers apply complex formatting to content elements.

Designers spend an inordinate amount of time on mundane tasks such as copy fitting. InDesign makes text changes easier with an integrated Story Editor. The Story Editor supplies a word-processor–style view of copy that in the finished layout may flow across several frames or pages.

InDesign CS recognizes the fact that not every print job is CMYK. Now the program imports duotone, tritone, and quadtone artwork. Also, you can produce the greatest number of printed colors with the fewest number of inks by using the new mixed-ink palette to combine varying percentages of two spot colors. Whether employing process or spot colors, designers will come to rely on InDesign's ability to preview separations. The plate-by-plate preview remains interactive, so you can edit a publication in separations view in order to fix potential printing problems.

Like Illustrator, InDesign can preserve layers when generating an Acrobat 6 file. There are also new tools, such as embedded video and audio files, bookmarks, and buttons, that let you produce interactive PDFs. Enhanced integration with other Adobe applications include faster import of native Photoshop files and an export option that can package print assets for use in GoLive.

Another feature in the Separations Preview palette is the Ink Limit. This lets you see exactly which areas of the page will print with more than a certain percentage of ink. While many designers may not use this type of feature, it is a real benefit to production managers and print shops that need to see how much ink will be on the page.

Adobe has added some nifty features for working with documents. First, you can create custom document presets that are available under the File menu or in the New Document dialog box. These presets hold all the settings for page size, margins, columns, gutters, etc., making it much easier to setup complicated documents.

InDesign also has new features for working with the bleed and slug areas of a document. The bleed area is outside the page boundaries and lets ink extend beyond the printable area. Before version CS, you could set the bleed amount, but you couldn't actually see the bleed area in the document window. Now a guide indicating the bleed area appears surrounding the page. In addition, you can set the slug area for a document. Advertising agencies often use a slug to hold information about the ad, the publication it will appear in, the client, and so on. (If you have never heard of a slug, then you probably don't need to set one.)

InDesign also provides three preview modes that show how the file will print with the trim, the bleed, and/or the slug areas for the file.

QuarkXPress users (and others) who looked at InDesign, often walked away muttering about the huge number of palettes to control various features. Strictly speaking there were ways of working in InDesign 2.0 without all that palette clutter, but Adobe has answered their gripes with several new features.

First, InDesign CS has a contextual Control palette. This palette goes far beyond Quark's Measurement palette in providing contextual feedback for each type of object chosen. Click inside a text frame, and you have a choice of all paragraph or character attributes. This even includes the ability to choose paragraph or character styles from the Control palette. Select an object and you get the object attributes including the transformation controls and stroke width. Click inside a table and you have control of almost all the table attributes. Select several objects and you have several of the commands from the Align palette. All told, the Control palette contains the controls for eight different palettes as well as many menu commands. This one palette makes it much easier to keep your screen uncluttered.

Of course, the Control palette can only do so much to tidy up your screen. So Adobe has added the ability to define workspaces to help organize your palettes. You can save your favorite palette arrangements and recreate them by choosing them from the workspace menu. This lets you choose one palette arrangement for working with text and another for working with pages and layers.

InDesign CS has borrowed collapsible palettes from GoLive CS. You can drag a palette tab to the side of your screen to show just the tab. Then, with a click, the palette opens or closes along the side of the monitor. The effect is similar to window shades that pop open or closed. The combination of all these features makes it easy to keep your screen clutter-free and should end gripes about palette overload once and for all.

Pathfinder Commands Another feature that QuarkXPress users complained about was InDesign's lack of commands for joining, subtracting, and intersecting overlapping objects. To do so meant trekking out to Illustrator and then reimporting the object. InDesign CS adds an Illustrator-like Pathfinder palette with five variations on these kinds of commands. Simply select your objects and apply the appropriate Pathfinder command.

InDesign CS has added controls that allow you to create all sorts of stripes and dashes. Adobe has gone further by adding something that all page layout users have been clamoring for: the ability to customize underlines and strikethrough lines. You can change the width, color, or type of line applied to text. While you applying underlines may not thrill you, this feature does let you create interesting effects, such as highlighting a word with a marker pen. Instead of pasting in separate frames as a highlight indicator, a highlight can easily be applied as a stroke with a single click.

Another feature that QuarkXPress users missed was support for multi-inks, or combinations of spot and process colors. This feature in XPress allows you to darken spot colors by adding black. This has been a terrific feature for working on two-color jobs. Now, InDesign CS has a similar feature, which Adobe calls Mixed Inks. You can take any spot color and mix it with another spot or process color.

Instead of having to define inks one at a time, you can also generate mixed-ink groups that automatically create different combinations of colors. Although the dialog box for the mixed-ink groups is non-intuitive, and the names of the swatches are confusing, the feature is much more powerful than the multi-inks in XPress.

One of the more exciting features in InDesign 2.0 was the ability to not only create tables but to flow them across pages or columns. But tables that continue from page to page also need a way of restating the table information on each new page -- header and footer rows that automatically appear on each page. InDesign 2.0didn't have that, but InDesign CS does. You can define rows to act as headers at the top of every instance of a table or as a footer to appear at the bottom.

Other new table features include the ability to unmerge cells that have been previously merged. You can also apply custom strokes to table cells, and even control whether the row or column stroke appears on top of the strokes it crosses. Finally, a new viewing option enables you to view cell frame edges even if there is no stroke applied to the frame. The only thing missing from InDesign CS tables are styles that allow you to quickly apply complicated table formatting such as custom cell borders, alternating row colors, and so on. If you do a lot of tables, you should consider investing in the separate plug-in WoodWing Software's Smart Style.

Perhaps one of the most revolutionary advancements in CS is the nested styles feature. These are character styles that can be automatically applied inside a paragraph style. For instance, many magazine designers like to start a paragraph with the first sentence is in bold or small caps, or some other special character style. With nested styles, you don't have to manually select each instance to apply that style. When you apply the paragraph style, the character style is applied at the same time. For example, if you want the first line in small, red caps, InDesign automatically applies that until the end of the sentence; the rest of the paragraph will be in the standard body test style. Nested styles make it very simple to apply complicated formatting to any type of structured paragraphs such as classified ads. The control for the nested styles lets you define how the character styles will be applied.

Much has been written about how applications in the CS package have been integrated to work better together. InDesign 2 was already well integrated with Illustrator and Photoshop. With InDesign CS, Acrobat 6 Professional and GoLive are better integrated as well. With InDesign CS, you can create interactive buttons as well as add sounds and movies for PDF export. This makes it possible to create enhanced PDFs without even having to open Acrobat.

Adobe PageMaker Plug-in Pack

Adobe PageMaker Plug-in Pack software adds eight popular PageMaker features to the standard feature set of Adobe InDesign CS software. It also provides in-depth training materials to help PageMaker users make the switch efficiently. The PageMaker Plug-in Pack ships with InDesign CS PageMaker Edition and with the Adobe Creative Suite. It is also available as a standalone download through the Adobe Store.

Included PageMaker Features

Publication converter for PageMaker 6.0 files - Convert PageMaker 6 documents and templates to InDesign CS format, and in some cases even fix damaged PageMaker files (with limitations). This capability expands the conversion support already in InDesign CS, which enables you to open PageMaker 6.5–7.x and QuarkXPress 3.3–4.x documents.

InBooklet Special Edition plug-in - Automatically rearrange a document's pages into printer spreads for professional printing with complete control over margins, gaps, bleeds, creep, and crossover traps — a process known as imposition.

Bullets and numbering - Automatically create numbered and bulleted lists that update dynamically when changes are made.

Data merge - Create customized publications such as direct mail pieces and catalogs from database information merged into your InDesign layouts.

Position tool - Resize and move images and their frames or reposition content in relation to frames using the handy Position tool, which works similarly to the Crop tool in PageMaker.

Template Browser and professional template sets - Jumpstart your projects with more than 80 templates created by leading designers. Use the Template Browser to browse, add, delete, and reorganize templates.

PageMaker compatible keyboard shortcuts - Work at peak efficiency by switching the keyboard shortcuts in InDesign CS to match the shortcuts you've already learned for PageMaker.

PageMaker toolbar - Access commonly used commands through icons on a toolbar similar to those found in Adobe Acrobat® and Microsoft Word.

Online Help system and user guide supplement - Refer to an online Help system and user guide supplement designed to answer how-to questions about InDesign CS from the point of view of a PageMaker user.

The Adobe Designer Templates Guide - Browse a guide to the professional templates included with the PageMaker Plug-in Pack. (An Adobe PDF version of the guide is accessible through the Template Browser.)

Price

$699 retail price
$169 upgrade price
(must have a serial number, and you will need a licensed version of InDesign 2.0 or earlier on the same platform as this purchase.)

Note that Adobe InDesign CS is part of the larger CS suite, the Adobe Creative Suite (CS) that includes, in addition to InDesign CS, Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe Photoshop CS, Adobe GoLive CS, and Adobe Acrobat Professional. This super Creative Suite lists for $1,229 for the Premium edition and $999 for the Standard edition. You can also purchase Adobe Photoshop CS by itself.

System Configuration Requirements

Windows
P-II, III, or 4 processor
Windows 2000 (SP 2), XP Home, XP Professional
128MB RAM
312MB free hard-disk space
CD-ROM drive
Video card that supports 256 colors at 1,024 x 768 monitor resolution
QuickTime 6.0 required for multimedia features

For Adobe PostScript printers: Adobe PostScript Level 2 or PostScript 3

Macintosh
PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor
Mac OS X v.10.2 through v.10.3
128MB RAM
350MB free hard-disk space
CD-ROM drive
256 colors at 1,024 x 768 monitor resolution
QuickTime 6.0 required for multimedia features

For Adobe PostScript printers: Adobe PostScript Level 2 or PostScript 3

Contact

Adobe Systems, Incorporated
Corporate Headquarters
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, California 95110-2704
408-536-6000
800-833-6687
FAX 408-537-6000

Order Online at Adobe Corporation
www.adobe.com/store/main.jhtml

You can also order from other retailers or online vendors.