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- Platform: Windows Vista / 7 / XP
- Media: DVD-ROM
- Item Quantity: 1
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Product Description
Amazon.com Product Description
Adobe InDesign CS5 software provides precise control over typography and built-in creative tools for designing, preflighting, and publishing documents for print, online, or to mobile devices. Bring documents and presentations to life with interactivity, animation, sound, and video. Leading industry tools, and productivity enhancements make page layout simpler and faster. Access Adobe CS Live online services* from within InDesign to streamline critical review processes.
 Adobe InDesign CS5 software provides precise control over typography and built-in creative tools for designing, preflighting, and publishing documents for print, online, or to mobile devices. Click to enlarge. |
Design professional layouts for print and digital publishing
Cross-media publishing
Publish documents in print, online, or on mobile devices. Create engaging interactive documents (SWF files) for playback in Adobe Flash Player, complete with animation, sound, and video, interactive PDF documents with video or sound, or sophisticated layouts for print publishing using a versatile, intuitive toolset.
Integration with Adobe CS Live online services
Improve the efficiency of critical design processes with new CS Live online services that work with InDesign. Conduct online reviews of page layouts using CS Review, one of the new CS Live online services. CS Live online services are complimentary for a limited time--visit www.adobe.com/go/cslive for details.
Integration with Adobe design, web, and digital-reading applications
Move projects smoothly from design to print or digital output thanks to tight integration with industry-leading Adobe solutions such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and Flash Professional, as well as Adobe Digital Editions.
Productivity tools
Produce sophisticated page layouts using customer-inspired productivity features such as the ability to include mixed page sizes in a single file, streamlined object selection and editing, an all-new Layers panel, smart guides, rapid table creation, and multiple-file placement with fewer clicks.
Robust text composition
Create beautiful, sophisticated text for any medium with professional typography features, including styles, text wrap, the Paragraph Composer, OpenType support, and drop caps. Include headlines that span or split columns without a separate text frame.
Built-in creative tools
Explore creative possibilities directly within InDesign using integrated drawing tools, nondestructive effects, built-in Adobe Photoshop effects, finer transparency controls, and support for 3D Photoshop artwork.
Preflighting and production
Speed up production, increase reliability, and deliver error-free documents with document-installed fonts, PDF export in the background, live preflighting, JDF technology, and on-screen controls.
Automation
Create powerful automated workflows to reduce the time you spend on repetitive tasks. Standards-based XML features can automatically lay out pages with text and images. Incorporate database-driven content for greater efficiency when publishing across channels.
Extensibility
Rapidly build unique workflows and software solutions for custom publishing using InDesign Markup Language (IDML), an XML-based file format that enables developers to create or modify files using standard XML tools.
Collaboration in editorial workflows
Improve collaboration between design and editorial teams with tight integration between InDesign CS5 and Adobe InCopy CS5 and the ability to track text changes in InDesign.
 Entice viewers to watch an embedded video by selecting a frame to represent it on the page. |
 Click to make the corners active, and then drag the corner diamonds to new positions. On-object controls make it simple to dynamically change the look and feel of a frame as you design. |
 The ability to combine multiple page sizes simplifies the layout of documents with complex folds, such as this magazine with a cover flap. Click to enlarge. |
Top new features of Adobe InDesign CS5
Interactive documents and presentations
Engage and inform readers and clients with documents and presentations that integrate interactivity, animation, sound, and video. Help reduce costs by creating interactivity directly in InDesign.
New intuitive panels help you add rich media to page layouts:
- Animation panel. Apply the same motion presets included in Flash Professional CS5, or add your own custom presets to InDesign to instantly animate objects on the page without writing code. Options in the Animation panel let you specify duration, speed, rotation, scale, and opacity. Quickly edit a motion path using the Pen tool, and convert any path--even one you import from Illustrator--into a custom motion path with the click of a button
- Object States panel. Create multi-state objects that indicate which button is selected, display images in a slide show, or show versions of text in different languages. Multi-state objects are page items that have multiple appearances. Object states can be images, text frames, or any other objects or groups you want to display when someone clicks or rolls over an interactive button while viewing an interactive document. For example, you might create a multi-state object that consists of multiple images to create a click-through slide show; when the viewer clicks a button, the next image appears.
- Timing panel. Control animation timing and playback without having to use a timeline to add keyframes or create motion tweens. Use the Timing panel to determine when objects such as bullet points in a presentation or images on a page should animate in the interactive document. For example, animations can be triggered to play when the page loads, when the page is clicked, or when a button is clicked. Loop the animation or play it a specific number of times. Link objects to animate simultaneously, with the same or different durations.
- Media panel. Preview and scrub through placed video files without leaving InDesign. You can select a frame from the video sequence to represent the video in your InDesign document before the video plays, and even create navigation points that determine which parts of the video play when you click a button or otherwise trigger an action.
- Preview panel. Take animations, buttons, and other interactive elements for a test drive without leaving InDesign. You no longer have to re-export your content every time you make a change to any rich media element--interactivity, animation, video, or sound--just to see how the change affects the document. Instead, preview and test a selection, the page, or the entire document before you export your final SWF file.
Simplified object selection and editing
Perform repetitive layout tasks efficiently in InDesign CS5. Numerous improvements can help make tasks such as aligning and distributing objects or customizing frame corners faster and easier.
- Multiple transformations with a single tool. You can use one tool to select, align, distribute, rotate, resize, reposition, crop, and scale frames and frame content. InDesign CS5 dynamically switches to the right tool for the job, so you never need to lift your mouse from the layout. The new Content Grabber lets you quickly reposition content within a frame, just by clicking and dragging. A real-time crop preview helps you position the content precisely where you want it.
- Gap tool. Adjust the white space between objects to dynamically reposition page items while maintaining design relationships. Shift the white space up or down, left or right, without having to crop or resize each object on the page individually. You can even expand or contract the white space, dynamically resizing or cropping adjacent objects accordingly. The new Auto Fit feature keeps the relationship between the object and its frame consistent as you resize the frame.
- Live Corner Effects. Drag the corners of a frame to dynamically change the radius and shape of the frame directly in the layout. Modify one corner at a time or all four simultaneously.
- Easy grid placement. Take the tedium out of placing images in a grid, as in a directory or catalog. Simply press arrow keys to add columns and rows for images or threaded text frames.
Integration with Adobe CS Review
Streamline reviews and accelerate your design workflow with CS Review, a new Adobe CS Live online service that integrates with InDesign CS5. Using CS Review, you can create and share documents for online review within InDesign. Colleagues and clients can view your document online and add comments with easy-to-use annotation tools directly in their browsers. All comments are automatically displayed in InDesign CS5, within the context of your page layout. Clicking a comment shows you the content it references, so you can easily match comments to the appropriate areas of page design. Simple sharing, easy access to reviews, and centralized comments speed up the review process to help you finish your project on time and within budget. CS Live online services are complimentary for a limited time.
Multiple page sizes
Simplify file management by creating pages of different sizes in a single document. Whether you're designing marketing collateral, brand identity deliverables, or a magazine layout with complex folds, keeping all of a project's assets in the same file shortens design and production time.
The new Page Selection tool makes it easy to select individual pages, which you can resize using options in the Control panel. You can easily share design assets by applying the same master pages to pages of varying sizes. With the Page Selection tool, you can even reposition the master page content for different layouts: select the page, select Show Master Page Overlay in the Control panel, and then drag the edge of the master page to position it over the page.
 Specify that a particular paragraph, such as this subhead, should span columns. Or, include the option in a paragraph style to format headlines quickly and consistently. Click to enlarge. |
 The Mini Bridge panel in InDesign gives you quick access to your assets. |
 InDesign CS5 provides the tools you need to structure and design eBooks. Click to enlarge. |
Track text changes
Get to final copy faster now that you can track text changes directly in your InDesign document. You can write, edit, and mark up text in InDesign with no need to import separate text files and remap styles every time there are copy changes.
With Track Changes enabled, InDesign keeps track of additions, revisions, and deletions in the document. The page layout remains uncluttered; to see the changes, simply open the Story Editor. There, you can accept or reject changes using options similar to those in popular word-processing applications. InDesign automatically assigns a different color for changes made by each user, so you can easily see who's made the edits.
Paragraphs that span and split columns
Quickly format headlines, subheads, or any text to span multiple columns in a single text frame. In previous versions of InDesign, all text in a frame conformed to the column width. To span a headline across multiple columns, you had to cut the headline out of the story and paste it into a separate text frame. Now you can apply settings to a paragraph, specifying whether the text should span some or all columns, or split columns, so that InDesign automatically reflows what was one column into two or more columns.
All-new Layers panel
The Layers panel has been completely rebuilt. If you're familiar with the Layers panel in Illustrator and Photoshop, you'll feel right at home in InDesign. You can now view not only layers but the individual objects they contain.
Select, hide, name, lock, and change the stacking order of objects such as text frames, images, and shapes directly within the Layers panel.
Reconfiguring grouped objects is fast and easy. With a quick click, you can reveal the hierarchy of objects within a group, including any hidden objects. Then, simply drag objects from one group to another in the Layers panel--with no need to ungroup, select items, and regroup.
Production enhancements
InDesign CS5 includes several productivity advances designed to help you deliver print and digital documents faster. Improved integration with Adobe Bridge software and the new Adobe Mini Bridge panel in InDesign, document-installed fonts, and the ability to export PDF documents in the background all can help you meet deadlines with ease.
The new document-installed fonts feature helps avoid the inconvenience of missing fonts during production and printing. When you package a document, InDesign includes fonts used in that document. When that document is opened on another system, InDesign looks for a document fonts folder and automatically installs those fonts for use only in that document. It then uninstalls them when the document is closed. This timesaving feature can help avoid costly design and print errors. While InDesign takes the hassle out of installing the fonts required for printing a design project, the appropriate font licenses are still required for any party creating or printing the document.
Now you can preview individual pages in an InDesign document in Bridge without opening InDesign. You can also view thumbnail previews of the images placed in an InDesign document in Bridge without having to open the InDesign file first, making it easier to locate and reuse images. In InDesign CS5, you can access much of the power of Bridge without leaving InDesign. Locate InDesign files, images, videos, and other assets using Mini Bridge, and drag them directly into position in your document.
Maximize your production time by exporting PDF documents in the background. InDesign takes advantage of 64-bit multithreading, so you can export large files as you work on other projects.
Print to digital
Quickly and efficiently extend your page content to the web, onto mobile devices, or for playback in Adobe Flash Player.
Hand off InDesign CS5 pages to Flash Professional CS5 with greater fidelity. The new text engine in Flash Professional retains typography you created in InDesign, including threaded text frames, so you can easily make last-minute text edits in Flash Professional. Multi-state objects and placed video and audio files included in the InDesign CS5 layout are carried over into Flash Professional. Objects animated with motion presets in InDesign are added to the Flash Professional timeline as motion objects. The original layer structure of the InDesign document is re-created in the Flash Professional timeline, so the Flash developer can easily understand how pages were created.
Create compelling eBooks with enhanced support for the EPUB file format. Author eBooks that can be read on a variety of devices such as the Apple iPad, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble nook, mobile phones, or personal computers using Microsoft Windows or Mac OS. Include interactivity, animation, sound, and video to bring eBooks to life when read on a personal computer using Adobe Digital Editions, a desktop reading application. Enhanced export features include the ability to control content reading order based on document structure, support for prebuilt CSS to provide consistent styling, support for chapter breaks, improved table formatting, and font subsetting.
Get a head start building web pages with enhanced export features that let you repurpose InDesign text and image content using Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 software. Using the Structure panel in InDesign, you can control the order in which page content is placed on the web page when imported into Dreamweaver. InDesign now generates CSS definitions that more closely match the text attributes you specify in InDesign to give you greater control over typography and reduce the need to rework text in Dreamweaver.
Live captions
Generate static or live captions for an image automatically from its metadata. Adding a caption such as the photographer's name or copyright information directly from metadata stored with the image saves time and helps minimize the chance of error.
Live captions change as the metadata changes. Static captions use metadata when you generate them, but aren't updated later. You can convert a live caption to a static caption at any time.
Product Description
Adobe InDesign CS5 software provides precise control over typography and built-in creative tools for designing, preflighting, and publishing documents for print, online, or to mobile devices. Bring documents and presentations to life with interactivity, animation, sound, and video. Leading industry tools, and productivity enhancements make page layout simpler and faster. Access Adobe CS Live online services* from within InDesign to streamline critical review processes.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful
I am a scientist, not a graphics professional. I used InDesign for the first time as version CS3 and was impressed; I successfully made several nice posters without too much effort. Now that I am writing two books for which I am creating many illustrations in Illustrator, I thought InDesign would be perfect for page layout. It certainly has the capabilities. My goal was to import a roughly 40-page chapter from MS Word 2010 and then add 13 figures with figure captions and two text boxes. I struggled for roughly 3 days, during which I watched numerous how-to videos and read a lot of instructions, before I got completely bogged down. For example, because InDesign is capable of advanced tasks like creating dynamic figure captions, I spent a lot of time trying to get it to automatically number figure captions. The process was painful and ultimately unsuccessful. I gave up, and on a whim tried MS Publisher 2010. What I couldn't accomplish after at least three days of effort using InDesign I was able to accomplish in less than 3 hours in Publisher. I don't know yet whether Publisher will be able to pull together all of my chapters and create a TOC and index like InDesign can, but since I couldn't even finish a chapter using InDesign, it's ability to work with multiple chapters is useless to me. And the interface for working with books in InDesign is a joke: it's a tiny panel; if you choose "Create new book" on the splash panel, you won't even know InDesign created a book, because the tiny panel is obscured by the splash panel. InDesign's interface is bland, and all of the icons and text are tiny and can't be made larger. Combine that with having to wade through a lot of jargon in the user manuals (typography jargon is especially annoying), and trying to learn and use InDesign CS5 proved to be painful, and required intense concentration and dedication. Yes, Adobe spent a lot of time producing helpful user manuals and how-to videos, but perhaps their time would be better spent making an easier to use product than trying to provide help for a hard to use program. In summary, InDesign CS5 is absolutely no fun to use, so if you can accomplish your page layout tasks with a simpler program like MS Publisher 2010, don't use it.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Remember 20 years ago when Word never did what you wanted it to do, and you had to save your document 20x in a 30 minute span because it always crashed. Welcome to the modern version of InDesign.
Drains your time: what I think will take 10 minutes ends up taking 30-40 minutes
Not intuitive: half of the basic functions are hiding
Search function is not user friendly
Language: they invented a new gibberish language
Icons/pictures: don't alway complete the function you request it to
If you purchase this software, I would highly recommend taking an in-person day+ training class. You will not understand how to operate it by using the tutorial videos and search function alone.
Drains your time: what I think will take 10 minutes ends up taking 30-40 minutes
Not intuitive: half of the basic functions are hiding
Search function is not user friendly
Language: they invented a new gibberish language
Icons/pictures: don't alway complete the function you request it to
If you purchase this software, I would highly recommend taking an in-person day+ training class. You will not understand how to operate it by using the tutorial videos and search function alone.
Amazon Verified Purchase
InDesign was the top commercial application recommended by my research. It was also on the short list of programs compatible with my printers; the ability to generate EPUB and Kindle books was finally important to me. That said, the series could still do more for the price that I'm paying.
--Dropping the Dollars--
ID is considerably more expensive than Microsoft Word or Microsoft Publisher, usually cheaper than Quarkxpress, and superior to them all in features and support. That doesn't stop Quark from being the standard bearer for a lot of publishing houses, and Word works well enough for creating PDF docs or Kindle ebooks. Yet the one-two-three combo of price, features, and support did knock me over to Adobe.
--Learning the Curve--
Coming from Microsoft apps, the initial learning curb looks steep, especially since the help files assume you have read the manual. The manual in turn, does not come with the package--it's a 40 megabyte, 619-page PDF downloadable from the net via the help window. Fortunately, there is an info window you can bring up, which gives contextual hints to whatever tool you have selected. And the community pages link to design blogs such as InDesign Secrets.
I've puzzled my way through PageMaker and older editions of Photoshop. Your mileage may vary, but through experimentation and reading I'm learning features in days. No need to watch help videos or hire tutors. Stuff that seems mysterious suddenly makes sense.
--Laying the Page--
It's a good thing too, because InDesign uses OpenType fonts which are much nicer looking and more flexible than Microsoft's own bundled faces. OT often includes: true small caps, true italics and bolds and optical sizes, a variety of alternate glyphs, and finer hinting for professional presses. The file sizes are also smaller and take up less space in an electronic document. The character and paragraph styles are also more powerful than Word or Publisher manage: with finer control over hyphenations, line leading, optical margins, and paragraph keeping. Print created in Microsoft apps are noticeable even when the designer uses advanced features. Also, the jump to KF8 for Amazon--a sort of EPUB-Lite--means Kindle Fire and future devices will be able to display cleaner and subtler differences between a book made in Publisher and a book made in ID.
InDesign does allow Microsoft styles, text, and colors to be imported. This is important because Word is much faster and easier for drafting manuscripts. Just bang out your book, copy-paste it to text frames in ID, and convert or revise as necessary.
Adobe interfaces are notoriously cramped and colorless. However, I prefer it to Microsoft once I got used to it. The text and graphics frames are less bulky, and grabbing things with the mouse pointer is more precise. The virtual paste board allows me to move things in and out of the document with ease, and without having to delete them or cut them into a scratch document. While a lot of tools are buried in the menus, it doesn't take much to load them into quick bars or learn the hotkeys. Sadly though, not everything has a tool box or a hotkey.
Finally, ID has advanced GREP features. These not only allow to search and replace large swaths of styles and text, they also allow a limited range of programming to customize your lines and paragraphs. The downside is that the customization feature is fiddly and doesn't substitute for officially supported GUI controls. For example, I have a code that causes the paragraph to automatically insert a Non Breaking Space between the last two words to cut down on orphans. However, this could just be done by upgrading the native orphan controls to include this common-sense fix.
--Working the Pictures--
I wanted an all-in-one-program, but InDesign can't manipulate images too much. I love the ability to link a JPEG, a PDF, a TIF, or even a PSD file as a image, directly into a graphics frame.
I despise the inability to change the saturation, hue, or shadows and highlights without using an external program. Adobe Photoshop comes in as a good companion, since you can import and export files between the two, they use similar interfaces, and they will sync your color management profiles via Adobe Bridge. If you don't want to plunk down another 600 bucks, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro and the Corel PaintShop Pro series will also edit TIF files for far less money. GIMP is a free editor alternative.
Finally, if you change an image in another program, or move it to another folder, you don't need to re-import it. InDesign has a links panel, which allows you to update the image used in your ID Document with a couple clicks of the mouse.
--Exporting the Books--
InDesign allows me to create PDF and EPUB files from the same book document. Amazon also has an effective Kindle plug-in for creating MOBI files. PDFs go to the printer or my website, and they allow all the usual ISO standards for print houses, in addition to custom settings--necessary if you want your web PDFs to have active hyperlinks.
The ebook export does a lot of the work for you, including font and TOC embedding, but it's still pretty stupid and doesn't produce a valid book out of the box. Sigil can clean up the EPUB without unpacking the container, and Calibre does the same for MOBI.
One advantage of using ID for ebooks is that you can create separate documents for each chapter or section and then collect them in the Book panel for export. This forces page breaks for each chapter because it creates separate HTML chapters. Obviously, this also allows all of the book's contents to be exported conveniently at one time.
But like I said, the export is stupid--it will create style subsets for each document, for each paragraph and character style you have. So Chapter 1 will use "p.Body", Chapter 2 will use "p.body-1", Chapter 3 will use "p.body-2", and on down the line. This is unnecessary and inflates the size of your files.
Adobe tries to keep the size down and also protect their font licenses. Embedded fonts will be automatically subsetted and obfuscated. A good thing because it allows faster downloads and rendering. A bad thing because some ereaders don't like Adobe's font mangling, and will incorrectly display the faces. For example, neither Pub It! nor Kindle Direct Publishing allows encryption in submissions. There is no way to turn off the feature. So use Sigil to strip the obfuscation for EPUB. For Kindle, the plug-in will export the fonts unmolested, and you can use Font Squirrel to subset them down to size.
--Performing the System--
In Design remains a 32-bit application, so don't drop it onto a Windows computer with 8 gigabytes of memory and expect it to just fly.
My five-year old HP Media Center is a Core 2 Duo system with a platter drive and 4 gigs of DDR2 933 memory. Here, In Design takes longer to boot than any other utility application I have ever owned on any Windows system I have owned, with the possible exceptions of Poser 9 and CAD LT 2012. Loading also uses a hefty chunk of RAM and CPU, but the latter settles back down. Memory consumption continues at 36% (including Internet Security and Windows background services). Also, when a large number of text frames or multiple columns are used in a single document, the program will slow down.
My new Intel Core i5-2500 station includes 8 GB of DDR3 1600 memory and most crucially, a Crucial m4 Solid State Drive . ID will still load slowly the first few times until the cache catches up. I'm now counting a boot time of 5-8 seconds. A doc with lot of frames or columns will only experience a touch of slow when typing or importing content.
--Things I'd Like to See--
Regardless of system specs, Adobe would earn more of my paying loyalty if they paid mind to the x64 market. They've already done so for Photoshop CS5.1 in 64-bit. This does not mean to make In Design more massive, it just means to make a program that gets around Microsoft's memory caps in an officially supported way.
For future editions of the InDesign Creative Suite, I can think of some other features for the dollars I'm slapping down:
>Sibling Sectors in Paragraph Styles... InDesign could cut down on the number of custom styles by introducing contextual paragraph rules, similar to the sibling sectors used in CSS for the web. For example, to automatically create extra space between a quote and body text, yet leaving normal space between two quote paragraphs. Without contextual rules: one would have to create a special line-break paragraph style, create two or three different types of quote paragraph, or spend a lot of time trying to come up with a GREP hack.
>No Break Controls... Instead of manually inserting No Breaking spaces all over the place, or fiddling with GREP, I'd like to see a No Break smart control in the Paragraph Styles options, along with the existing adjustments for hyphenation and keeping. Read more ›
--Dropping the Dollars--
ID is considerably more expensive than Microsoft Word or Microsoft Publisher, usually cheaper than Quarkxpress, and superior to them all in features and support. That doesn't stop Quark from being the standard bearer for a lot of publishing houses, and Word works well enough for creating PDF docs or Kindle ebooks. Yet the one-two-three combo of price, features, and support did knock me over to Adobe.
--Learning the Curve--
Coming from Microsoft apps, the initial learning curb looks steep, especially since the help files assume you have read the manual. The manual in turn, does not come with the package--it's a 40 megabyte, 619-page PDF downloadable from the net via the help window. Fortunately, there is an info window you can bring up, which gives contextual hints to whatever tool you have selected. And the community pages link to design blogs such as InDesign Secrets.
I've puzzled my way through PageMaker and older editions of Photoshop. Your mileage may vary, but through experimentation and reading I'm learning features in days. No need to watch help videos or hire tutors. Stuff that seems mysterious suddenly makes sense.
--Laying the Page--
It's a good thing too, because InDesign uses OpenType fonts which are much nicer looking and more flexible than Microsoft's own bundled faces. OT often includes: true small caps, true italics and bolds and optical sizes, a variety of alternate glyphs, and finer hinting for professional presses. The file sizes are also smaller and take up less space in an electronic document. The character and paragraph styles are also more powerful than Word or Publisher manage: with finer control over hyphenations, line leading, optical margins, and paragraph keeping. Print created in Microsoft apps are noticeable even when the designer uses advanced features. Also, the jump to KF8 for Amazon--a sort of EPUB-Lite--means Kindle Fire and future devices will be able to display cleaner and subtler differences between a book made in Publisher and a book made in ID.
InDesign does allow Microsoft styles, text, and colors to be imported. This is important because Word is much faster and easier for drafting manuscripts. Just bang out your book, copy-paste it to text frames in ID, and convert or revise as necessary.
Adobe interfaces are notoriously cramped and colorless. However, I prefer it to Microsoft once I got used to it. The text and graphics frames are less bulky, and grabbing things with the mouse pointer is more precise. The virtual paste board allows me to move things in and out of the document with ease, and without having to delete them or cut them into a scratch document. While a lot of tools are buried in the menus, it doesn't take much to load them into quick bars or learn the hotkeys. Sadly though, not everything has a tool box or a hotkey.
Finally, ID has advanced GREP features. These not only allow to search and replace large swaths of styles and text, they also allow a limited range of programming to customize your lines and paragraphs. The downside is that the customization feature is fiddly and doesn't substitute for officially supported GUI controls. For example, I have a code that causes the paragraph to automatically insert a Non Breaking Space between the last two words to cut down on orphans. However, this could just be done by upgrading the native orphan controls to include this common-sense fix.
--Working the Pictures--
I wanted an all-in-one-program, but InDesign can't manipulate images too much. I love the ability to link a JPEG, a PDF, a TIF, or even a PSD file as a image, directly into a graphics frame.
I despise the inability to change the saturation, hue, or shadows and highlights without using an external program. Adobe Photoshop comes in as a good companion, since you can import and export files between the two, they use similar interfaces, and they will sync your color management profiles via Adobe Bridge. If you don't want to plunk down another 600 bucks, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro and the Corel PaintShop Pro series will also edit TIF files for far less money. GIMP is a free editor alternative.
Finally, if you change an image in another program, or move it to another folder, you don't need to re-import it. InDesign has a links panel, which allows you to update the image used in your ID Document with a couple clicks of the mouse.
--Exporting the Books--
InDesign allows me to create PDF and EPUB files from the same book document. Amazon also has an effective Kindle plug-in for creating MOBI files. PDFs go to the printer or my website, and they allow all the usual ISO standards for print houses, in addition to custom settings--necessary if you want your web PDFs to have active hyperlinks.
The ebook export does a lot of the work for you, including font and TOC embedding, but it's still pretty stupid and doesn't produce a valid book out of the box. Sigil can clean up the EPUB without unpacking the container, and Calibre does the same for MOBI.
One advantage of using ID for ebooks is that you can create separate documents for each chapter or section and then collect them in the Book panel for export. This forces page breaks for each chapter because it creates separate HTML chapters. Obviously, this also allows all of the book's contents to be exported conveniently at one time.
But like I said, the export is stupid--it will create style subsets for each document, for each paragraph and character style you have. So Chapter 1 will use "p.Body", Chapter 2 will use "p.body-1", Chapter 3 will use "p.body-2", and on down the line. This is unnecessary and inflates the size of your files.
Adobe tries to keep the size down and also protect their font licenses. Embedded fonts will be automatically subsetted and obfuscated. A good thing because it allows faster downloads and rendering. A bad thing because some ereaders don't like Adobe's font mangling, and will incorrectly display the faces. For example, neither Pub It! nor Kindle Direct Publishing allows encryption in submissions. There is no way to turn off the feature. So use Sigil to strip the obfuscation for EPUB. For Kindle, the plug-in will export the fonts unmolested, and you can use Font Squirrel to subset them down to size.
--Performing the System--
In Design remains a 32-bit application, so don't drop it onto a Windows computer with 8 gigabytes of memory and expect it to just fly.
My five-year old HP Media Center is a Core 2 Duo system with a platter drive and 4 gigs of DDR2 933 memory. Here, In Design takes longer to boot than any other utility application I have ever owned on any Windows system I have owned, with the possible exceptions of Poser 9 and CAD LT 2012. Loading also uses a hefty chunk of RAM and CPU, but the latter settles back down. Memory consumption continues at 36% (including Internet Security and Windows background services). Also, when a large number of text frames or multiple columns are used in a single document, the program will slow down.
My new Intel Core i5-2500 station includes 8 GB of DDR3 1600 memory and most crucially, a Crucial m4 Solid State Drive . ID will still load slowly the first few times until the cache catches up. I'm now counting a boot time of 5-8 seconds. A doc with lot of frames or columns will only experience a touch of slow when typing or importing content.
--Things I'd Like to See--
Regardless of system specs, Adobe would earn more of my paying loyalty if they paid mind to the x64 market. They've already done so for Photoshop CS5.1 in 64-bit. This does not mean to make In Design more massive, it just means to make a program that gets around Microsoft's memory caps in an officially supported way.
For future editions of the InDesign Creative Suite, I can think of some other features for the dollars I'm slapping down:
>Sibling Sectors in Paragraph Styles... InDesign could cut down on the number of custom styles by introducing contextual paragraph rules, similar to the sibling sectors used in CSS for the web. For example, to automatically create extra space between a quote and body text, yet leaving normal space between two quote paragraphs. Without contextual rules: one would have to create a special line-break paragraph style, create two or three different types of quote paragraph, or spend a lot of time trying to come up with a GREP hack.
>No Break Controls... Instead of manually inserting No Breaking spaces all over the place, or fiddling with GREP, I'd like to see a No Break smart control in the Paragraph Styles options, along with the existing adjustments for hyphenation and keeping. Read more ›
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