UGN articles UGN articles
Victoria Maciulski from CVMUG reviews Adobe InDesign cs
Our most recent 16-page newsletter was produced using InDesign cs. (That's not a typo - it's supposed to be a lowercase 'cs.') Soon after I got this version, Adobe released the new InDesign cs PageMaker Edition. From the literature, it says it includes the full edition of InDesign cs plus the PageMaker plug-in pack. Unfortunately, I don't have the PageMaker plug-ins, so they won't be reviewed here.
Just so you know, I've been an InDesign fan since I first used it in September 2002. (I had been a PageMaker user for 15 years prior to that.)
Right off the bat, my favorite new feature is Nested Styles. This allows you to automatically format a paragraph to have multiple styles, in a specific order. You define the point at which it changes from one style. It can be any specific character, like a tab or colon or the new End Nested Style Here invisible character. Or you can specify the number of words or characters that a style has until the next style begins. This is great when you have a bunch of paragraphs that you need to apply the same multiple styles to. Obvious examples are drop caps or doing numbers or bullets in a different style than the paragraphs they begin. I would like it even better if we could have a soft return (or a line break that doesn't begin a new paragraph) to use as a point to begin and end nested styles within a paragraph.
My second favorite new feature is the addition of the Story Editor. We always had that in PageMaker, and it was the thing I missed most when I moved to InDesign. If you have a long story that threads across multiple pages, you can use the Story Editor to view the whole story in a sort of 'plain text' view. It goes the PageMaker version one better by allowing the user to specify which font, size, line spacing and text color for the display of the Story Editor. Because Story Editor doesn't show the line breaks or text box limits from the layout, you have to check your editing in the layout.
My third favorite feature is not new. It was in InDesign 2.0. It's the ability to manage a book. When you choose File --> New --> Book, you get the Book palette. I used it recently to organize several chapters that I had written into a book. On the Book Palette, I just clicked on the fly-out arrow to Add Document, navigated to the appropriate InDesign document, clicked Open, and it was added to the Book Palette. After adding several documents, I noticed that the Book palette automatically knew that the first chapter was 4 pages long and showed that it numbered pages 1 to 4. It knew that the second document was 6 pages long and showed it as pages 5 to 10. When I re-arranged the order of the chapters, by simply dragging them up and down in the palette, it automatically re-numbered all the pages in the documents! When I open a document by double clicking on its name in the Book Palette, I can edit, apply Master Pages, everything I normally do. You can also pre-flight the entire book from within the palette.
You can now align just the first line of a paragraph to a baseline grid. Previously, it was all lines of the paragraph or none. This is great for re-aligning text after a subhead that uses different leading from the grid.
There's a Separations Preview Palette that lets you preview all 4 of the color seps before printing. Pre-press people will applaud this one. It appears to be limited to CMYK and up to 10 spot colors, though I don't know anyone who uses more than 10 spot colors in a document.
If your document will eventually end up as a PDF or web site containing a movie or buttons for interactivity, there's good news in this version, for you can embed movies and sound files. Although media clips cannot be played directly in the InDesign layout, they can be played when you export the document to Adobe PDF (Acrobat 5 or 6), when you export the document to XML and repurpose the tags, or when you package for GoLive.
Quark die hards will like the addition of a contextual Control Palette, similar to Quark's Measurements Palette and mixed inks colors - process and spot. You can even create a graduated palette with a range of hues from your inks.
One problem: When I select a graphic and use the Transform palette to re-size it, the palette always says the size is 100%, no matter what percentage I re-size it to. This is irritating, as I can't keep track of the current size percentage in case I need to re-size it again.
I saw demos at MacWorld, where they were touting the palettes that docked on the side of the screen. When they demoed them, I thought it might be cool, but found them irritating and hard to manage. I ended up making up a customized workspace and saving it. I'm glad InDesign lets you do that.
You cannot save an InDesign cs document in a form that is backwards compatible with version 2. That was also true when saving from version 2 - no down saving. But the number of users prior to version 2 was significantly less than there are on version 2. Adobe says they'll fix this oversight in a future version.
They've abandoned the Export to HTML feature for the feature that will export XML for GoLive. This prevents the user from using the 'simple' solution.
The new features, combined with its incredible handling of tables, transparency, typographical controls and masking, make it a choice for earlier users of InDesign, as well as Quark and PageMaker users. InDesign is clearly headed towards dominance in the page design and layout area.
Return to: the top of this page, or the INDEX for this department
Exit to: The User Group Network front page
Contact: The Editor, Webmaster or Membership Director