S Adobe Indesign Cs3
Book DescriptionThis thorough, self-paced guide to AdobeInDesign CS3 is ideal for beginning users who want to master thekey features of this program, while readers who already have someexperience with InDesign can use this book to familiarizethemselves with InDesign CS3's newest features. Using step-by-step,project-based lessons, each chapter contains a project that buildsupon the reader's growing knowledge of the program, while reviewquestions at the end of each chapter reinforce the most importantskills learned in each lesson. Table of Contents.
Since Adobe released InDesign CS2 — the fourth version of the company’s challenge to QuarkXpress — in 2005, a lot has happened. InDesign has increased its market share in the design and publishing world. Adobe acquired Macromedia and its product line (including Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks), and InDesign’s chief rival scored a victory in the battle between the two by releasing QuarkXpress 7.0 as the first major page-layout software to run natively on the Intel-based Macintosh platform.What a difference two years makes. Adobe has countered Quark at last with an application that is now Universal (compatible with both Intel and PowerPC-based Macs).
More than that, it has done the same for all of the products in its Creative Suite, which now comes in six different editions; three of which — Design Standard ($1,199), Design Premium ($1,799), and the mouth-wateringly complete Master Collection ($2,499) — include InDesign CS3. It’s no secret that the “Suite” strategy has gone a long way toward the successful adoption of InDesign. Most XPress users depended on at least two other products in previous versions of the Creative Suite, and purchasing the complete package was both a bargain and an opportunity to try out the new kid on the page-layout block. But it was InDesign’s feature set, ease of use, and integration with the other products in the Suite that made converts out of the curious.Adobe’s concentration for this new version is squarely on efficiency, automation, and customization.
This reflects another focus for the company: its customers. Adobe has clearly been paying attention to the growing number of InDesign users, as evidenced by the addition of features like Table and Cell Styles (the number-one feature request, according to Adobe) and Text Variables, as well as significant improvements to InDesign’s existing Find/Change and Numbered List functionality.What You SeeInDesign CS3, like the rest of the applications in the Creative Suite, sports a new user interface that replaces palettes with panels. Those of you who’ve downloaded the Photoshop CS3 public beta will already be familiar with that application’s implementation of this new UI. In the CS3 products, palette groups are now called panel stacks, and these stacks reside in a dock (or multiple docks, if that’s how you prefer to work) you can view either fully expanded, reduced to an icon and name mode, or collapsed down to a single column of icons (Figure 1). This minimized icon-only view replaces the hinged tab method for stowing away palettes of previous versions.
You can pop out any full panel with a single click on its icon.Figure 1. New docked panel interface can be viewed fully expanded (left), in a compact icon-and-name mode (center), or a minimized icon-only view (right).The well-designed icons are, for the most part, an elegant solution for achieving the elusive balance between accessible controls and available screen space. The dock is highly customizable, and you can create, arrange, and organize multiple docks on the right or left sides of your workspace. There is one irksome drawback to the new interface: only one full panel at a time is visible when the dock is in icon-and-name or icon-only mode. Clicking another icon closes any open panel automatically (even if the panels are in separate docks), and there’s no preference available for changing this behavior. You can tear off panels and panel stacks from the minimized dock, letting you have multiple panels open simultaneously (Figure 2), but I’m hoping for an update that resolves this shortcoming.Figure 2.
A free-floating panel (left) and panel stack (right) detached from the dock.InDesign My WayThere’s nothing to complain about with the improved Control panel in CS3, however. Increased functionality, flexibility, improved controls, and customization options provide one-click control over tasks that were either unavailable in previous versions or buried in the old palette’s menu. Users working on large displays will appreciate that the Control panel adds more contextual options as screen space allows. When working with text, for example, additional paragraph-related options now show up when the palette is in character mode, and vice-versa. Customizing the Control panel to suit your own needs is now possible from the panel menu, where you can turn off any unwanted options. Rotate and Flip controls have been added to the Control panel, along with a Proxy image that indicates the rotation or reflection of a selected object and provides a contextual menu option to clear all transformations.
Also added to the Control panel are options for text wrap, object distribution, table cell insets, Table Style and Cell Style drop-down menus, and controls for opacity, drop shadow application, and access to the new Photoshop-style Effects (Figure 3).Figure 3. New options available from InDesign CS3’s much-improved Control panel.Another new feature that first debuted in Photoshop is menu customization. You can toggle on or off the visibility of any application or panel menu item, and color-code menu items to better organize and find frequently used commands (Figure 4). These settings can be saved as sets and included as part of a custom Workspace. This is a great way to quickly configure the application to suit a given task — text formatting, layout and design, or pre-press preparation, for example.Figure 4. Photoshop-style menu customization migrates to InDesign in the new version.My favorite UI improvement in CS3 is the Pages panel, which now displays page thumbnails for both document and master pages in either medium, large, or extra large sizes.
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The palette also scrolls as you move pages around within it — a feature that was sadly lacking from previous versions (Figure 5).Figure 5. Greater visual feedback and functionality have been added to the Pages panel, including auto-scrolling when moving pages.CS3 for DesignersOnce you’ve acclimated yourself to the new interface and customized it to your linking, the big question is: What’s in the new version for me? At first glance, InDesign CS3 may not appear to include the kinds of eye-popping, must-buy feature additions of its predecessors. However, behind its polished new veneer are countless, less obvious changes that range from small, elegant touches (double-clicking an image frame to switch between selecting the frame and its content) to sweeping workflow transformers (placing native InDesign files inside other InDesign files).The flashiest of these new features is the Effects panel that replaces the Transparency palette and brings Photoshop-style effects directly into a layout.
In-document effects in previous versions were limited to drop shadows and feathering. InDesign CS3 adds familiar Photoshop effects such as Inner Shadow, Outer Glow, Inner Glow, Bevel and Emboss, and Satin (Figure 6).
These effects can be applied individually or in combination to any frame, shape, image, or stroke, and to fully editable text. The all-or-nothing Feather option from CS2 and earlier is now called “Basic Feather”; much better feathering is available with the new Directional Feather and Gradient Feather options. You control these settings in the Effects dialog, which is similarly Photoshop-like and includes that application’s familiar rotary Angle dial and the option to set a Global Light to keep effects consistent.Figure 6. New Photoshop-style Effects available for objects as well as live, editable text are controlled with the Effects panel and Effects dialog.For my money, the more important and useful transparency update in CS3 is that separate settings can be applied to the fill, stroke, and text of any single object. If you want a frame with a dark fill that uses a multiply blend mode, contains opaque white text, and has a drop shadow applied to just the stroke, you no longer need to create three separate objects to accomplish that, as you did in previous versions (Figure 7). Unfortunately, this level of independent transparency control does not extend to tables, but even with that limitation, this is a much-needed addition that lets you be creative and still work efficiently.Figure 7. A single text frame with a drop shadow applied only to its stroke, a gradient feather and Multiply blend mode applied to its fill, and no transparency at all applied to the text.Speaking of efficient design, the Nested Styles of InDesign CS and the Object Styles of CS2 are joined in CS3 by Table Styles and Cell Styles.
If you’re already familiar with Teacup Software’s excellent plug-ins for this functionality, you’re ahead of the game. Adobe bought that technology and built it into CS3. Now, one-click formatting of Tables is nearly as easy to set up as a Paragraph Style or Object Style. Tables have more peculiarities than either of those (cell inset spacing, strokes, alternating fills, header and footer rows, etc.), so building a Table Style requires up-front planning and effort, but once established, you can apply the style to multiple tables by either clicking the style name in the Table Styles panel (Figure 8), or dragging and dropping the style name from the panel over the table in your layout (another nice new touch in CS3 that also works with Object Styles).Figure 8. Same table, different styles.
Table Styles in CS3 allow settings for header and footer rows, body rows, and left and right columns, while Cell Styles incorporate Paragraph Styles, fills, inset spacing, etc.Complex tables with merged cells and customized multi-row headers may not lend themselves to 100% automation through Table Styles, but just the ability to save all attributes of a cell — inset, stroke, paragraph style, alignment, etc. — as a style will speed up the creation and modification of such tables.Table and Cell Styles also provide the key to another productivity boost: placed spreadsheets that maintain links to their source document (for example, an Excel file), can be edited in the external file, then updated in InDesign with the table formatting preserved. For designers working on large financial documents and annual reports, this will be a very welcome new feature.Page-layout efficiency is taken up a notch in CS3 with a powerful pair of new options. The multi-file place feature loads your place cursor with multiple images, text, spreadsheets, PDFs, etc. You can cycle through what’s to be placed with the arrow keys and use the Escape key to discard the currently previewed image. A number in the cursor counts down the remaining files to be placed, and each file’s type (text, image, vector/PDF) is indicated with a small icon (Figure 9).Figure 9. The new, multi-file “place gun” loaded with three files: a Word document, Photoshop image, and an Illustrator graphic.
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Multimedia content (video, audio, and Flash) shows only as an icon — there’s no preview thumbnail.The other half of this powerful one-two page-layout punch is the new Frame Fitting feature. Images can be automatically sized to fit, positioned, or cropped to your specific settings when placed into frames with these Fitting options assigned to them (Figure 10). Fitting options can be included as part of an Object Style to further speed up their implementation.Figure 10.
Frames can be pre-fit by applying Frame Fitting Options such as cropping and positioning, as well as how placed images will fill the frame.Creative collaboration and workflow efficiency are both facilitated by the addition of a simple idea with enormous potential: placing native InDesign files inside other InDesign files. Webmail hack 3.5. With this new feature, projects can be broken up into parts of a page. One designer can be formatting a sidebar while another works on a half-page ad, and a third designs the overall layout, which will include both. As each designer updates his or her portion of the layout, the links in the main layout can be updated like any other placed file.When a document that contains a placed InDesign file is opened, missing font and link warnings appear for both the “host” file and the placed files (Figure 11). Likewise, when preflighting and packaging a file that contains other InDesign files, the fonts and images of the placed files are also checked and collected.
There’s tremendous potential for this seemingly small — and unexpected — new feature. It’s similar in principle to the Composition Zones of QuarkXpress 7 (which I confess I have not used) but seems more simply and flexibly implemented.Figure 11.
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Font and link warnings, and corresponding missing and modified icons in the links palette, are displayed for all placed InDesign files.There are many other, smaller features that designers will appreciate in CS3.