A giant step forward
Publishing III: InDesign CS enters its next phase with new features, better integration, and numerous improvements.
Publishing III The InDesign CS program enters the next round with new functions, better integration and numerous improvements. 18 months after InDesign CS, Adobe is now launching InDesign CS2. The update is a largely new version with many additional functions such as marginalia, object styles and footnotes. The updated layout application will again be available as part of the Adobe Creative Suite (CS2), which will be available from June, or separately. New object styles: Professionals use character and paragraph styles to mark up and format text. For recurring graphic elements (text boxes, picture frames, margin notes), they previously had to make do with a library. This is now changing in the new InDesign version. With the so-called object styles, objects can be formatted as desired and an object style can be created from them. The process works in a similar way to text formats: The software collects all the attributes of the object (fill, outline, transparency properties, text frame options) and links it to the newly created object style. Changes to the format then affect all objects that have been provided with the object style.
Mouse-free formatting: "Quick Apply" is the name of a new method for formatting text. By pressing the Apple (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) key together with the Return key, all paragraph and character formats or object styles can be accessed directly. A pull-down menu, which appears after pressing the two keys, now allows you to enter text. If you now type a "G", for example, the palette only shows formats/styles that contain a "G" - for example "Basic text". A line switch assigns the format to the text to be formatted. This makes the mouse redundant - and the user faster.
Interaction: InDesign CS2 supports compositions in PSD format (Photoshop's own data format), and layers in PDF documents (PDF version 1.5) can also be accessed. Import options and the object menu after import allow you to define which layer of a placed file should be visible. Furthermore, when updating placed objects, you can choose to retain what is visible in the image or PDF document. Instead, the layers/channels created in Photoshop or in the PDF document can also be used.
Individual pages from multi-page PDF documents can now also be easily imported or placed on the layout page. A mouse click is all it takes to scroll through the pages when importing.
Text import: InDesign CS2 automatically resolves name conflicts with character or paragraph templates, which often occur when importing documents in Microsoft Word format. A particularly practical feature is that Word templates can be assigned to InDesign templates. Specifically, a "Title 1" template can be converted directly into the "Main title" template of the InDesign document during import. These import settings can also be saved.
Smart Text: Some will love it, others will be annoyed by it: As known from Office applications or QuarkXPress, you can now also move text in InDesign CS2 using "drag and drop". Thanks to the "Drag and drop text editing" function, all you have to do is select the text and then drag it to another position in the document. Pressing the Alt key at the same time copies the text - and if a new text frame is to be created, this can be done elegantly by pressing the Apple/Ctrl key. "Text editing by dragging and dropping" also enables dynamic spell checking and improved handling of user dictionaries.
Real footnotes: Layouting multi-page documents used to be a relatively simple matter - at least as long as no footnotes were required. InDesign CS2 also eliminates this shortcoming. A simple command ("Insert footnote") can now be used to create footnotes that run with the footnote reference. These can be easily formatted globally.
Marginalia: In addition to footnotes, marginalia (text in the margins) used to be another hurdle. Adobe calls a function designed to remedy this situation "anchored objects". To do this, the text cursor must be placed in the appropriate position and an anchored object inserted. InDesign then asks at what offset to the cursor the frame should be placed.
In addition to graphics running in the text, an offset outside the column is also possible. This goes so far that you can instruct InDesign to always position anchored frames on the outer edge of the page: On the left for left-hand pages and on the right for right-hand pages. If the anchoring in the running text now moves from a left-hand page to a right-hand page, the marginalia also automatically changes sides or is mirrored.
Vector graphics: Many elements/graphics that were previously created with Illustrator or Freehand, for example, can now be produced directly in InDesign. To further improve the handling of vector paths, Adobe has expanded the Pathfinder. This means that several vector objects can now be merged into one in InDesign, for example, or one vector object can be mathematically subtracted from another.
Color management: Adobe has made ICC color management in Creative Suite 2 more practical. Unwanted CMYK-to-CMYK transformations are now also a thing of the past. It is important to know that color management is switched on by default in all Creative Suite applications (including InDesign CS2).
Colors: Anyone who painstakingly creates color swatches in Illustrator can now access them directly in InDesign, Photoshop and GoLive. To do this, the color swatches must be exported in Adobe Swatch Exchange format (*.ase).
Metadata: In order to find your data more quickly in future, it makes sense to describe it with metadata. Adobe has long since developed the XMP metadata format for handling this data describing objects, images and documents and made it available in earlier versions of InDesign. InDesign CS2 sets a good example and automatically enters the colors and fonts used in the metadata of each file. Clever, because this means that important information about the document is already visible in Adobe Bridge (the file browser integrated in Creative Suite 2). This goes so far that in future it will be possible to search for InDesign files that use a specific spot color or font, for example.
Compatible with CS1InDesign CS2 is compatible with InDesign CS1. Adobe uses the InDesign Interchange format, a complete XML ("Extensible Markup Language") representation of the InDesign file. InDesign CS1 can open such a file. However, a corresponding update of the Creative Suite is required. This can already be downloaded from the Adobe website. However, it is often not necessary to replace the entire document: Dragging and dropping InDesign objects onto the desktop or into Adobe Bridge creates so-called snippets (small XML files with InDesign content). These snippets can then be placed in other InDesign files. The position of the original document is even adopted.
Advances in XMLLAdobe has also significantly revised XML import and export. With the help of XML designed for marking files with metadata, tables can now be "tagged" throughout, i.e. linked to the original, and also exported. This also makes it possible to incorporate content from databases into tables. The XML files can now also be linked like images and graphics during import. This makes it easy to update them.
There are other exciting extensions for XML import. If you import many data records from a database as XML content into the layout, you only need to format one sample record. The subsequent data records automatically adopt the formatting/appearance of the first one. Furthermore, if desired, only elements that also appear in the structure of InDesign can be imported - or elements from InDesign that do not appear in the XML file can be deleted.
The exchange of content with Adobe GoLive, which was already introduced with Creative Suite 1, has also been improved. On the one hand, only selected objects or a page range can be exported for GoLive, and on the other, GoLive CS2 can now directly generate XHTML sites (an HTML extension). This is a particularly useful function for simple print-web integration.
InDesign CS2 makes it possible to read layers from Photoshop and PDF documents.
Mouse-free formatting: "Quick Apply" is the name of a new method for formatting text. By pressing the Apple (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) key together with the Return key, all paragraph and character formats or object styles can be accessed directly. A pull-down menu, which appears after pressing the two keys, now allows you to enter text. If you now type a "G", for example, the palette only shows formats/styles that contain a "G" - for example "Basic text". A line switch assigns the format to the text to be formatted. This makes the mouse redundant - and the user faster.
Interaction: InDesign CS2 supports compositions in PSD format (Photoshop's own data format), and layers in PDF documents (PDF version 1.5) can also be accessed. Import options and the object menu after import allow you to define which layer of a placed file should be visible. Furthermore, when updating placed objects, you can choose to retain what is visible in the image or PDF document. Instead, the layers/channels created in Photoshop or in the PDF document can also be used.
Individual pages from multi-page PDF documents can now also be easily imported or placed on the layout page. A mouse click is all it takes to scroll through the pages when importing.
Text import: InDesign CS2 automatically resolves name conflicts with character or paragraph templates, which often occur when importing documents in Microsoft Word format. A particularly practical feature is that Word templates can be assigned to InDesign templates. Specifically, a "Title 1" template can be converted directly into the "Main title" template of the InDesign document during import. These import settings can also be saved.
Smart Text: Some will love it, others will be annoyed by it: As known from Office applications or QuarkXPress, you can now also move text in InDesign CS2 using "drag and drop". Thanks to the "Drag and drop text editing" function, all you have to do is select the text and then drag it to another position in the document. Pressing the Alt key at the same time copies the text - and if a new text frame is to be created, this can be done elegantly by pressing the Apple/Ctrl key. "Text editing by dragging and dropping" also enables dynamic spell checking and improved handling of user dictionaries.
Real footnotes: Layouting multi-page documents used to be a relatively simple matter - at least as long as no footnotes were required. InDesign CS2 also eliminates this shortcoming. A simple command ("Insert footnote") can now be used to create footnotes that run with the footnote reference. These can be easily formatted globally.
Marginalia: In addition to footnotes, marginalia (text in the margins) used to be another hurdle. Adobe calls a function designed to remedy this situation "anchored objects". To do this, the text cursor must be placed in the appropriate position and an anchored object inserted. InDesign then asks at what offset to the cursor the frame should be placed.
In addition to graphics running in the text, an offset outside the column is also possible. This goes so far that you can instruct InDesign to always position anchored frames on the outer edge of the page: On the left for left-hand pages and on the right for right-hand pages. If the anchoring in the running text now moves from a left-hand page to a right-hand page, the marginalia also automatically changes sides or is mirrored.
Vector graphics: Many elements/graphics that were previously created with Illustrator or Freehand, for example, can now be produced directly in InDesign. To further improve the handling of vector paths, Adobe has expanded the Pathfinder. This means that several vector objects can now be merged into one in InDesign, for example, or one vector object can be mathematically subtracted from another.
Color management: Adobe has made ICC color management in Creative Suite 2 more practical. Unwanted CMYK-to-CMYK transformations are now also a thing of the past. It is important to know that color management is switched on by default in all Creative Suite applications (including InDesign CS2).
Colors: Anyone who painstakingly creates color swatches in Illustrator can now access them directly in InDesign, Photoshop and GoLive. To do this, the color swatches must be exported in Adobe Swatch Exchange format (*.ase).
Metadata: In order to find your data more quickly in future, it makes sense to describe it with metadata. Adobe has long since developed the XMP metadata format for handling this data describing objects, images and documents and made it available in earlier versions of InDesign. InDesign CS2 sets a good example and automatically enters the colors and fonts used in the metadata of each file. Clever, because this means that important information about the document is already visible in Adobe Bridge (the file browser integrated in Creative Suite 2). This goes so far that in future it will be possible to search for InDesign files that use a specific spot color or font, for example.
Compatible with CS1InDesign CS2 is compatible with InDesign CS1. Adobe uses the InDesign Interchange format, a complete XML ("Extensible Markup Language") representation of the InDesign file. InDesign CS1 can open such a file. However, a corresponding update of the Creative Suite is required. This can already be downloaded from the Adobe website. However, it is often not necessary to replace the entire document: Dragging and dropping InDesign objects onto the desktop or into Adobe Bridge creates so-called snippets (small XML files with InDesign content). These snippets can then be placed in other InDesign files. The position of the original document is even adopted.
Advances in XMLLAdobe has also significantly revised XML import and export. With the help of XML designed for marking files with metadata, tables can now be "tagged" throughout, i.e. linked to the original, and also exported. This also makes it possible to incorporate content from databases into tables. The XML files can now also be linked like images and graphics during import. This makes it easy to update them.
There are other exciting extensions for XML import. If you import many data records from a database as XML content into the layout, you only need to format one sample record. The subsequent data records automatically adopt the formatting/appearance of the first one. Furthermore, if desired, only elements that also appear in the structure of InDesign can be imported - or elements from InDesign that do not appear in the XML file can be deleted.
The exchange of content with Adobe GoLive, which was already introduced with Creative Suite 1, has also been improved. On the one hand, only selected objects or a page range can be exported for GoLive, and on the other, GoLive CS2 can now directly generate XHTML sites (an HTML extension). This is a particularly useful function for simple print-web integration.
InDesign CS2 makes it possible to read layers from Photoshop and PDF documents.
Paragraph, character formats and object styles are centrally accessible.
In InDesign CS2, the appearance of objects can be saved as a style.
Word style sheets can be assigned to InDesigns character and paragraph styles.
Anchored objects (to be used for marginalia) can also be positioned outside the record edge.
InCopy CS2 Adobe InCopy has also been updated. The separately available program InCopy CS2 is for editors what Adobe InDesign is for designers. Based on the same text engine, articles released by InDesign can be written line by line in InCopy. While the designer is still working on the page, the editor can start filling the text. The link between InCopy and InDesign in larger environments is provided by an editorial system.
For smaller workgroups, there is Adobe LiveEdit (formerly: InCopy-Bridge), a connection between InDesign CS2 and InCopy CS2 based on the file system. When using Creative Suite 1, the editor must have access to the InDesign file with this file system solution in order to be able to write line-by-line. Assignments now provide a remedy here. Assignments are a kind of mini InDesign layouts for InCopy. They only contain what is important for the respective editor. This is an important enhancement, especially if the editorial and production departments are separated.
In addition, the positioning tool can be used to place or move images in existing frames. InCopy CS2 can also be used to access layers created in InDesign and documents can be opened in Word and RTF format. The application also enables the text-before-layout workflow for the first time without the need for additional third-party tools.
(hu)
Haeme Ulrich
