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- Provides: Page layout
- Format: DVD
- Developer: Adobe
- Minimum Requirements: G4 PowerPC-based or Mac Intel-based processor, Mac OS X v10.4.8, 512MB RAM, 1.6GB hard disk space, 1,024x768 monitor resolution with 16-bit video card, DVD-ROM drive, Internet or phone connection for product activation, broadband Internet connection for Adobe Stock Photos and other services, QuickTime 7 for multimedia features
- Processor Compatibility: Universal
- Retail Price: $699.00 complete; upgrades start at $199.00; also available as part of Adobe Creative Suite 3.
- Availability: Out now
- Version Reviewed: 5.0.1.624
Adobe has done a fantastic job in creating a program that, from out of nowhere, was strong competition to a program that had already been out for a long time (cough Quark cough). With this new, fifth version, Adobe provides a more fleshed out program, rather than introducing some major new features. That's not to say the new features are small, but those Mac users who've been waiting for FrameMaker capabilities (after Adobe killed the Mac version in April 2004) within InDesign will have to continue to wait. There are Text Variables (new with ID-CS3, explained below) that are powerful, but right now, very limited. The good news is that there have been some great refinements and wonderful UI improvements across InDesign's features and abilities.
Sporting the new Panels look of the rest of the CS3 suite (except for Acrobat, which continues to go its own way), Indesign is also now Intel Native, running on either a G4, G5 or MacTel machine.
If there is any improvement I use and like the most, it would have to be something that's profoundly trivial in the grand scheme of things: the expanded functionality in the Control Panel. The Control Panel is the strip of controls across the top of the screen that vary depending on which tool you are using. If you do any composing directly in ID as I often do, you probably have been equally frustrated with having to constantly switch between the Character and Paragraph formatting modes. Now, if your screen is wide enough, clicking back and forth is no longer necessary. Specifically, if you are in the Paragraph Formatting mode and you need to made an adjustment in the Character Formatting mode, it's all there, and vise versa. So, if you are in the Text Control Panel (see the image below), the Text controls are on the left, and now the Paragraph controls are on the right. Similarly, if you are in the Paragraph Control Panel, the Paragraph controls are on the left, and the Text controls are on the right. On either Panel, there are three vertical lines to designate the transition between the primary and alternate controls.
[Note: Please keep in mind that the images below have been cut up to fit in this review. My monitor is 1600 pixels wide, and the wider your monitor, the more information is shown. However, at Applelinks we have a 500 pixel wide limit to our images. Thus, I chose to chop each image into small pieces at 100% image size as opposed to shrink the image down to 500 pixels wide, which would make everything too small to see.]
Below is the Paragraph Control Panel and if you have this selected, you can still change the font, font size, leading, etc. all without having to click back on the Text Control Panel.
Below is the Text Frame Control Panel that lets you control borders, wrap-around, alignment and even columns.
Lastly, below is the Graphic Frame Control Panel who's only difference from the Text Frame Control Panel (above, found in the third strip) is that there is no ability (or reason) to create columns, set text location in the frame, or shrink the frame to text. Although, curiously, if you change a Text frame to a Graphics frame (this is performed using the drop down menu, also in the third strip), these functions remain.
While the new Control Panel behavior may not seem to be a major change and/or improvement, it has saved me an enormous amount of time, or at least it feels like it does. Keep in mind that you need to have a greater than 1024 pixels screen resolution or this feature cannot be seen. The ironic issue about this is anyone presenting InDesign on a projection device cannot show you this, as the widest projection devices are 1024 pixels wide.
Before I leave the Control Panel, let me also point out that the icon on the furthest right on the strip shows the Control Panel's commands which include the customizing window seen below. Thus, if you do not want, need, or have room for such options as "Transform X-Y-W-H," remove them.
The next icon on the left is a direct link to Bridge, and the little lightning bolt is not to bring you to Harry Potter's website, but rather to bring up the new and improved Quick Apply Palette. Similar to the version that came with CS2, this lets you quickly access styles and controls if you (a) know exactly what the items name is and (b) can bring the Quick Apply window up (Command-Return) and (c) type the proper name faster than if you went to a Panel. For me, this is a lost cause, as I'm a visual kind of guy. But if you are a touch-typist, this is a god-send.
As far as changes in this new version of Quick Apply, it is now an actual palette that can be moved around, lengthened, and adjusted to your workflow. Second, from Quick Apply, you can now control just about any and everything you want to in InDesign. Unfortunately, if everything is selected, the number of options is overwhelming. The good news is that by turning off things like Scripts and Menu Commands, most of which that's left over are only the various Styles you've created.
Note above that each category has a unique letter variable (seen in the drop down menu). If you type Command-Return to bring up Quick Apply, and then type the appropriate letter and a colon, you will then see only the styles you've created (plus any default styles) as seen below. If you continue to type (say "b"), then only the body style will show, and it's selected.
Where this can be a real time saver, even for a person like me, is if you have a Character Style that you want to intersperse throughout a paragraph, like bolding people's names. So, if you have a Character Style created called "bold-names," then you type Command-Return, "c," ":," and "b" (it would look like "c:b"), tap enter, and you are done. In addition, if the next opportunity to use Quick Apply was for the same operation as the previous one, the setting is sticky so that if you brought up Command-Return again, "c:b" is still in the enter field and is active ready to either be changed (by typing something else) or tapping Enter to accept the setup change.
Styles also have been enhanced by the addition of Table and Cell Styles. Now, rather than recreating Tables over and over from scratch, you can create a table style (e.g., alternating colors with special top row and left column features) and set any subsequent table into the same style by simply selecting the style. Same goes for cell styles. The latter is important if you almost never create the same table style but have need for components of tables that need to be reused. Thus, if you sometimes need cells with san serif text, bold at 12 point rotated 90° CW, save that as a Cell Style and you can reuse that setup as needed.
Speaking of Styles, you can now bundle styles into collections. Thus, if you have lots and lots of styles, you can place them into logical groups for easier access, visual location, and use. This is another one of those "little things" that will be saving me lots of time. However, scripters be warned, the structure of these was designed for backwards compatibility with earlier versions of InDesign. The way these are created within ID means that they cannot be found via a script. If you are not a scripter, this will not effect you. If you are, then this makes this feature essentially worthless.
Before I completely leave the Control Panel, let me toss in here that the PageMaker Toolbar is still there, but is now called the Command Bar. It is initiated from the Widows menu (see below).
As seen below, I've cut the screen shot in half to fit within the size constraints at Applelinks. (Adobe still is trying to make their icons too small to be seen by anyone older than 40.) The Command Bar is one of those you-"love-it"-or-"ignore-it" kind of tools that some people really really like, others ignore it. At least it doesn't hurt or get in the way, as one can remove it by deselecting it from the Windows menu. Curiously, the other items it's joined with (from the Object & Layout menu selection) are all combined together as a default Panel collection.
Perhaps one of my favorite new big features is the Effects Palette (as opposed to the Effects Panel—more on that in a second) that is brought up any time you initiate any special effect. Combining all of the various possible effects into one Palette is wonderful in itself. However, to make it even better, they've separated Objects from Strokes, Fill, and Text. Thus, if you want an effect to be on text and a stroke but not on the fill, no problem.
Acting like Layer Effects in Photoshop, you have Blending modes and a full range of effects, including Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer and Inner Glow, Bevel and Emboss, Satin and three different Feathers: a Basic that feathers the edges, a Directional Feather that feathers one side, and a Gradient Feather that feathers from one side and grades to none-feathered on the other side (radial or linear). Be advised that you have to select the correct item to feather or it may seem like things are not working right. Below, you can see a gradient feather placed on both objects and/or fills. On the left is a green fill, and on the right is a photo, both placed inside an oval. The gradient feather works great on the fill but is ignored entirely on the photo. This is because the photo is not a fill, but rather an item placed inside an object. If you try to feather the object (as opposed to the fill or the photo), the feathering effects the drop shadow as well as the object because all of that is the object. The trick to make this work is to select the photo and not the frame before enacting the feather effect.. Then you can create the feather on the photo and not affect the drop shadow. Either way, note that the shadow of the stroke is completely separate in both and can be seen behind the oval in both the green fill and the photo.
The full power of the Effect Palette is quite wonderful. If you look at the image below, you can see that I've got the shadow of the stroke going one way and the shadow of the text going the other way (I've turned off Global Light to do this), I've got a Bevel and Emboss going on the fill, and I haven't done anything to the object itself. My apologies for the look of this example (artistically, it's ugly), but I was simply making a point—this is a great and powerful tool.
I do have one issue with the Effects Palette that is either my error or understanding, but I find that the directional controls for feathering seem to be 90° off. If you look at the image below, look at the location of the feather in the image and look at the Angle control in the Palette. The effect is 90° off of the shown angle. This doesn't make any sense to me. Either this is a bug or I do not understand how it's supposed to work. Either way, it's a small issue.
Two more issues specific to the Effects Palette: before ID CS3, if you clicked on the "Preview" checkbox for Drop Shadow or any other effect, the next time you used that feature you had to reselect "Preview" to see what your activities looked like. Now, finally the "Preview" option is sticky and will remain on until turned off. This is another one of those little things that is a biggie. The other issue is that if you are used to how Photoshop works, you will get a bit frustrated with this Effects Panel because there are no Scrubbies in InDesign. As Photoshop users know, if you mouse-down over the text of any field, you can slide the mouse left and right to increase and decrease the numbers of that field. Well, you can't do that in InDesign. So close, yet so far...
A moment ago, I mentioned there was an Effects Panel that was different from the Effects Palette. As seen below, if you click on an object, you can set the transparency and blend mode, and access the Effects Palette. In addition, it shows the state of any setting (note that I have set the text at 44%). What I do find a bit disappointing is what it doesn't show. For example, it shows the stroke's blending mode as Normal and that it is at 100% Opacity, but it doesn't show that the stroke is at "0" points. In addition it shows that there is an effect on the text (a shadow), but it doesn't indicate what the effect is. What I'd like to see here (at a minimum) are triangles that show up when multiple conditions on any part that you could click on to display all of the conditions for that part. The reason why this would be handy is that when you are in the Effects Palette, it's all to easy to set some effects for (say) the Object and some effects for the Fill. Since you cannot see what effects you set up for Objects when you are in the Fill drop-down in the Effects Palette, the Effects Panel could provide that ability.
Speaking of images in Frames, there is a new functionality with a new Option (and a strange bug). If you go to the Objects menu (with nothing selected), drag to Fittings... and select "Frame Fitting Options," you can then select any of the four options shown below and subsequent "Place..." operations of images into frames will automatically be sized to your liking.
However, there's an interesting catch to make this work: as some of you know, if you create a standard frame from the tool bar as seen below, you can use that frame for text or images. However, you can also take the Objects tool and create any kind of frame as well. It's very bizarre, but if you create a Frame Tool frame, the above trick will not work. If you create an Objects Tool frame it will. Go figure...
And speaking of "Place," there are several new aspects about that as well. Multi Place is very cool. In ID CS2, if you had a bunch of images you wanted to bring in, you had to select File (menu) -> Place, find the item, select it, and place it and then repeat as many times as necessary. Now, if you have (say) four items to place and you've already created the frames ready to receive them, simply select all of the images you want to use and, once back in ID, you will see a small thumbnail of your images ready to place as seen below.
As seen above, there is a small number in the upper left side that shows how many items you've stored. As you click into each frame, the image showing is placed into that frame. Each time you place that image, it is removed from your stored images and the number goes down by one. If the image showing is not the one you want to place in that frame, press the arrow keys to move from image to image. When you combine this with the Auto Frame setting trick of above, you have an extremely efficient mechanism to move images into your ID documents. This also works for text.
Incidentally, if you use Layer Comps in Photoshop, you can access these after they've been placed in ID by going to Objects -> "Object Layer Options..." and selecting the Layer Comp you want to use...after you've placed the item.
Besides placing images, you can also place InDesign documents. This is quite a bit different from importing text because if you select File -> Place..., and select an InDesign document, you will not end up with editable text in the InDesign document you are working on. Rather, you will end up with an image of the document that you placed. And if you try to enter or alter text, you can't. However, if you right (Control) - click this placed document, you can select "Edit Original" and you will be taken to the original InDesign document that you placed. Any change in this document that you save will be immediately updated in the placed page image. In addition, as long as you maintain the link between the original document and this placed page(s), any changes will be updated accordingly. If you do this, keep in mind that you will be placing an entire page, not any article contained within. That is, if you have a page with half a column of text, when you place this page, you will end up with the same half-column page. The only way to do anything to the other half of the column, or anything on the page, is on the original document.
By the way, when you place an InDesign page, you need to click on the edges of the page, not the inside guides as seen below. This is because the page you are placing starts from the edge of the page, not the edge of the Guide.
Also be aware that the placed page will look odd, almost like it's not quite in focus. It will print just fine, but it will look odd on the screen.
With all of the limitations that are on placed pages, the question may come up as to why one may want to use them. The answer is "assigned pages and/or chapters." Anyone who's had to deal with assigned pages and/or chapters knows that this means multiple people can work on one document by each individual working on their "section" of that document. However, the removed aspect of this (e.g., the inability to have any direct contact with the placed text without accessing the external document) may limit the full benefit.
There are now new visual aids in the Pages Panel: thumbnails of your pages. As seen below, you can select a preference so your page icons can be thumbnails of what's on your pages. While these are way too small to really see anything specific, they do give you a visual clue of what's generally on a page. As small of a thing that this may seem, it's vastly superior to what we had before: blank page icons. Now, if you know generally the structure of what page you might be looking for, you can easily find the page visually and, by double-clicking the page, get right to that page. Obviously, this is of limited assistance if your pages are mostly text.
Among my "little favorites" are the new functionalities in "Text Wrap." In previous versions of ID, if you take an object and select "Wrap Around Object" and there is a chance for the text to creep onto the far side (as shown below), it will. If you did not want the text on the right side, you could either bring a second invisible object behind your desired object and set it to prevent the text on the right side, or you could play with the object border (with the Direct Selection tool) and expand it so that nothing would show up on the right side. All doable, but in the grand scheme of things, shouldn't be necessary. With CS3, it isn't.
Now with ID CS3 you have "Wrap Options." With Wrap Options, you can easily select where you want the text to be (or not to be). Also note that in the middle of the region where you can set the distance between the object and the text boundary, there is a chain link icon—also new with CS3. This lets you control the distance between the text and your image on all sides all at once or one side at a time.
As I mentioned early in the review, there are a few features that begin bringing over some of the power from FrameMaker into InDesign. These are initiated with Text Variables which provide text that automatically varies depending on the situation and/or context. From the Type menu, one selects Text Variables -> and either selects the specific item or selects Define, which brings up the following window.
Some of these are fairly straightforward and work well. For example, if you set up on your Master Page to have auto-page numbering, you can easily insert the "Last Page Number" at the end of your text code and each page will automatically say (for example) "Page 2 of 3." As you add new pages, the last page number automatically advances as well. If you have a running book, the Chapter number will advance accordingly. And if you insert chapters between previously made chapters, they will all adjust accordingly as well.
The Running Header is the most powerful of the lot, and you can see why by looking at the Edit features as seen below. What Running Header does is extract text from a specific style and place the selected text in this text variable frame. It can be in the Header, Footer, or wherever you want to place the text variable. What you need to do is select the Style from which you want to extract the text. In my test example, I created a Style called Section Title, and I wanted specifically to use the first one (as opposed to the last one) in the page. As you customize these, you can rename them. The renamed items will appear alongside the default Text Variables.
If you create two of these and name them "Header first" and the other "Header last" and if the text in the Section Title were (say) the alphabet, you could create a Running Header that had "This page contains "H - M"" and would change dynamically as the alphabet showing on any given page changed.
Although not new in CS3, one can also create dynamic numbering in Styles via the "Bullets and Numbering" tab in the Paragraph Style Options. This is rather cryptic and not touted much as it's not as "user friendly" as are much of ID's other features. However, what cannot be done is to have dynamic cross-references of the results of any of these dynamic numbering contained within the text of your document. This is one of the biggies that many FrameMaker users are still waiting for. Hopefully, the creation of Text Variables is an early taste of what might be to come. Footnotes are still weak, and there is no work-around to properly do Endnotes.
One of the big, pleasant surprises is the big muscle now in the Find and Replace. While you've always been able to Find and Replace various words and some punctuation, if you know Grep, you will love InDesign. I will not try and explain Grep in this review (if you're curious, you can always search the term in Yahoo or Google). But if you know Grep, I do not have to say any more. As seen below, Adobe provides some pre-made saved searches, most of which are punctuation. However, also note that the last two are object search and replace operations.
Besides the Grep, text and Objects, you can also do a search and replace for Glyphs, as seen below. If you are using "Pro" or Open Type fonts, you know the range of character variations is considerable. If you've set one character in a book and later decide to change to a different "Swash" of some kind, go ahead and change it throughout the book in one operation. Neat.
As a rundown of other features, you have XML for designing and formatting, XSLT for style sheets, UI creation for JavaScript scripts, XHTML export to Dreamweaver and Adobe Digital Editions.
There are also tremendous scripting features in ID that can be run off of other menu commands (like Macros in MS Word), and ID comes with a tremendous amount of pre-made scripts that can be accessed via Window (menu) -> Automation -> Scripts. Check these out to get a better idea of what can be done.
Note that "Packages for GoLive" has been dropped, as GoLive has been dropped from the Suites. [GoLive 9, the successor to GoLive CS2, is available for purchase from Adobe's website.]
In short, this is one of those upgrades that is great, but limited. I can't say there are any knockdown, drag-out, gotta have new features. There are a number of enhancements that make this a very nice upgrade, just not essential for many people. If you have InDesign CS2 and none of the features I've mentioned make you go "whoa!" then probably there's not much of a full reason to upgrade. On the other hand, if you have the Design Suite CS2, there is more than enough with all of the new programs of CS3 contained therein that this is a no-brainer—it's part of the package. As in any productivity program, if there's any feature that will help pay for the program either in performance and/or efficiency, it's a done deal.
Now we wait and see (and hope) if InDesign CS4 (out in 2009-2010 or so) will give us what we lost in FrameMaker back in 2004.
See other Adobe CS3 reviews.
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
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