REVIEW: Adobe InDesign cs
REVIEW: Adobe InDesign cs
- Subject: REVIEW: Adobe InDesign cs
- From: Victoria Maciulski <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 20:22:49 -0800
Review - Adobe InDesign cs
by Victoria Maciulski
Our most recent 16-page newsletter was produced using InDesign cs.
(Thats not a typo - its 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 dont
have the PageMaker plug-ins, so they wont be reviewed here.
Just so you know, Ive been an InDesign fan since I first used it in
September 2002. (I had been a PageMaker user for 15 years prior to
that.)
What I Love
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 doesnt 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 doesnt
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. Its 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 4. It knew that the second document
was 6 pages long and showed it as pages 5 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.
Other Additions
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.
Theres 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
dont 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, theres 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 Quarks Measurements Palette and mixed inks colors - process
and spot. You can even create a graduated palette with a range of hues
from your inks.
Improvements Needed
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 cant 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. Im 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 theyll fix
this oversight in a future version.
Theyve abandoned the Export to HTML feature for the feature that will
export XML for GoLive. This prevents the user from using the simple
solution.
Bottom Line
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.
)2004 Victoria Maciulski, Newsletter Editor, Conejo Ventura Mac User
Group (CVMUG)
email@hidden, iChat: toriamac
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