Adobe InDesign CS Upgrade (Mac)

Rating:
Summary: Takes Page Design to a New Level
Review: Adobe PageMaker has evolved into InDesign CS. Shedding its caterpillar skin, InDesign CS has emerged as a marvelous butterfly. It is fitting tribute that a pen and butterflies adorn the Adobe InDesign CS box.

Adobe InDesign CS software combines production power with graphic freedom. Designers can lay out pages more rapidly. You will find that InDesign CS shares standard Adobe commands, tools, palettes, and shortcuts with Adobe
Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator software programs.

Work More Efficiently with InDesign CS

InDesign creative toolset gives flight to your design ideas. Designers and Illustrators can work more efficiently with InDesign's organized tools. You will save production time by importing native Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator files.

Business designers can work with popular PageMaker features in InDesign CS. This includes data merge, ALAP InBooklet Special Edition for imposition, and dynamic bullets and numbering. InDesign CS easily converts PageMaker 6.0 and 7.0 files with the included document converter.

Work Experience with InDesign

I find the InDesign Story Editor similar to PageMaker Story Editor. Using Control "Y" or simply right-clicking (or control-clicking) the text will call up the Story Editor. This allows you to use live editing for your page design's content and styles.

I can edit text and make changes in a section of my document without having to go to my "Continued on Page . . ." I have found this helpful in a multiple page document. You can set the preferences for font, font size, line spacing and background color.

Unfortunately, Story Editor is not a full-featured text editor since there are no spell checker, outlining, or table capabilities.

You can set your document "presets" for page size, columns and margins that are similar to Printer and PDF Export presets. Using the InDesign selection tool, I can drag the handles and press the shift key to preserve the frame's
original proportions. In addition, you can import styles from Microsoft Word.

InDesign CS has resizing capabilities but it takes several attempts to get resizing done right. I find it easier to resize my photographs in Photoshop before importing graphics to InDesign. This allows me to crop images to my desired shape and resize them.

I can move the palettes by holding the Option key and dragging them anywhere on my desktop space. You can make changes to tables and your headers and footers and line them up to where you want them to appear.

Pro Reaction

The standard Adobe interface works well with InDesign CS, Photoshop and Illustrator. InDesign has nested styles and XML support. InDesign CS has a new Story Editor and better separation and new flattening previews. Noted was improved performance and new tools and palettes in InDesign CS.

Con Reaction

Within InDesign CS, you cannot save files for use with InDesign 2.0 or earlier. You cannot save InDesign files to QuarkXPress. Opening complex pages within InDesign CS takes a large amount of time on Mac G3 computers.

Final Remarks

This InDesign CS version is a full-blown power-packed upgrade. I feel that InDesign CS will convert more PageMaker and Quark users over to the new Adobe InDesign CS program.

Rating:
Summary: Now the best, but so was Betamax
Review: Given the creativity and productivity improvements available in InDesign I would like to think the world would drop Quark and instantly embrace InDesign. I'm sure Adobe would like that, too. Fat chance. The CS version is truly a program come of age and a worthy inheritor of the page layout crown. But, alas, the world runs on Quark and that doesn't seem likely to change any time soon. I use it because I have to, not because I want to. I just hope InDesign doesn't become the software version of the Betamax.

Rating:
Summary: Nearly identical to CIB 1.5
Review: I like InDesign. Despite its over-abundance of options and choices, it does a good job at design. My complaint lies with Adobe's CS version of Classroom in a Book. I'm sitting here with their version 1.5 book and the CS version. They are nearly identical.

The CS book has been upgraded to show OSX screen shots and is 515 pages long, as opposed to 421 pages in the 1.5 book. Both books feature the same, tired, lessons, the majority of which use the very same wording, paragraph after paragraph. I know, when you've got a good lesson, why change it? But for $45. each, some new lessons would have been in order.

The older book has 20 pages (10 sheets) of colored reproductions of the graphics in the lessons. The new book has not one page of color, except for the front and back covers.

The new book has a chapter (24 pages) entitled, "Combining Files into Books". It's new and does look helpful.

Overall, it's probably worth the money, given the upgraded OSX format and some new material, but I still think that Adobe (the fine company that it is) could have done better by including at least 50% new material.

Rating:
Summary: Quark: move aside!
Review: InDesign CS is perhaps the application that benefited most from the most recent upgrade that Adobe made to its key applications, bringing a load of useful and highly expected features and built to take advantage of all the system enhancements that OSX Panther has to offer. I'd like to stress ONE feature, though, that blew me away... two words: NESTED STYLES. If you have suffered through the painful process of laying out a document where more than two styles are required in a particular content block, you will shed tears of joy when you see this at work!

You are bound to also find very handy the enhanced table features such as automated running headers and footers for tables that run across multiple linked text frames. Printers (people in the printing industry) are also going to be happy (or so Adobe wants) with the features that have been included in InDesign CS for them.

All in all, if I were Quark, I'd be shaking because InDesign is not going to stop until it takes over the current market share that QuarkXpress has... it's just a matter of time and perhaps a version or two more. But try CS now: I think you will love it!

Rating:
Summary: A Matter of Choice
Review: InDesign-a lovely second act to the ubiquituous Quark. I have been using Indesign for about three months and while I appreciate many of the differences, I find it a perplexing and often frustrating program. It seems to have a mind of its own. Type suddenly becomes highlighted, drop shadows appear unwanted, and if anyone can figure out the how to line type up on the baseline (the fools at Adobe support certainly don't) please let us in on it. It's a program with too many choices, too many foolish options. Design, while always in the market for options can suffer from too many, delicate controls. I am happy to have learned InDesign, but I must confess it is with some relief and confidence that I often return to that embattled Quark just to get the job done.