Adobe InDesign CS

Rating:
Summary: Another great upgrade to InDesign
Review: As a long-time user of Adobe PageMaker and as a person who preordered InDesign 1.0, I can easily recommend InDesign CS to anyone who needs a well-thought out, superbly engineered page-layout program. InDesign 1.x's typesetting power was the product's initial selling point. To that Adobe has added nested styles in release 3.0, a capacity that can eliminate hour's of busywork performed by those working with long and complex documents.

One caveat: InDesign's users want footnoting! Better table handling would also be much appreciated! Please!!!!

Rating:
Summary: Possibly the best package of its kind
Review: I think when a piece of software is as good as InDesign, you can't help being hard on its weaknesses. If only it did this, or that, it would be perfect, you think to yourself.
I switched from working in Corel Draw, which despite its severe limitations when producing multi-page documents still has many features InDesign could use to great effect and which I miss. As a Corel Draw user, I find it irritating to have to switch between fill and stroke (especially for text) before applying colour, when before it was left click for fill, right click for stroke. I also miss Corel's multi function tools, and it seems clumsy to have to switch to a different tool to resize a box you've just drawn.
But you get used to that sort of thing the more you use it.
After six months of use, I'm generally delighted by InDesign's power and logic, but there are some issues that Adobe really must take care of.
There are no automatic bullets or numbered lists for instance. A glaring omission. There's no 'on the fly' spell checking with wiggly red lines, which is another odd thing to leave out. There's a bug in the align function which makes aligning clumsy. The tool palettes are too small and hard to see and adjust. Switching from the text tool is a clumsy affair that leads to constant errors. The scroll function on the mouse has a bug that means it stops working every so often. You can't make a headline span several columns in one text frame like you can in Corel Ventura. Printing samples like booklets is unnecessarily difficult and baffling. Use this thing for six months and you end up with a list of essential improvements.
BUT, the good still outweighs the bad to a large degree. I like InDesign for its unerring stability, its integration with the other CS programs, its wonderful pro text handling and the way it lets you produce a long document with great ease. I guess the best thing about InDesign is that I trust it: I know that when I deliver a file to my printer that they'll be able to handle it and I'll get what I expect. When you're working to tight deadlines, this means a lot.
So, it's great. Perhaps the best of its kind now. But it could be quite a bit better!


Rating:
Summary: PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE AND CHANGES FOR THEIR OWN SAKE
Review: I'm a publishing pro and upgraded to Indesign only because I had to to use OS X.
Everything is changed, and not for the better. Improvements I can understand, but what I see is change for its own sake.
The changes don't make Indesign easier than Pagemaker. They make it harder.
It's like buying a new car every 5 years and having to learn to drive all over again because it steers with the foot pedals and honks when you turn right. Why? No reason. Just because. Ah well, that's progress.

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. 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!