Description:
InDesign 2.0 is all about creative page layout. A high-end desktop publishing product, it is aimed squarely at professional designers who need maximum flexibility alongside strong document management and support for industry standards. Eye-catching features such as transparency and blending are combined with more mundane--but important--abilities such as table of contents and index generation, to make this a more complete and rounded product than earlier versions. It also benefits from integration with other Adobe products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, and Acrobat. Adobe maintains a consistent user interface across the range, easing the learning process. The heart of a desktop publishing product is typography, for which InDesign is second to none. The software offers fine control over drop capitals, kerning, tracking, justification, and scaling. OpenType fonts offer advanced features such as contextual alternative characters, which automatically insert ligatures or other special glyphs according to their place within a word. The paragraph composer optimizes spacing and hyphenation for an entire paragraph, retrospectively reformatting earlier lines as you type. A great feature of InDesign is that imported graphics remain editable. For example, InDesign has its own excellent tools for drawing shapes and paths, so you can import an Illustrator drawing and continue to work on it. The transparency options not only let you control opacity, but also offer special effects such as drop shadows, feathering, and multiple blending modes such as soft or hard light. InDesign has complete support for professional printing standards, but Adobe also delivers on cross-media choices, such as PDF, HTML, and SVG, which is an emerging standard for Web graphics. There is also an option to import, export, and edit XML, with exciting possibilities for repurposing content. InDesign 2.0 is ideal for magazines, advertisements, and brochures. For books or manuals, something like Adobe FrameMaker is a better choice. InDesign offers strong competition to the market-leading Quark XPress, and the fact that its system requirements are heavier is perhaps balanced by the fact that InDesign is half the price of Quark. Convenience features such as multiple undo and redo make InDesign a pleasure to use. Creativity in print has never been easier. --Tim Anderson
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