The Creative Toolbox: InDesign Gets Real

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As early adopters of Adobe InDesign can attest, the initial release of Adobe’s “Quark killer” was a little rough around the edges. Despite requiring huge amounts of RAM and a speedy computer, version 1.0 omitted a few significant features that QuarkXpress users were accustomed to having. With version 1.5, Adobe addresses a good many of version 1.0’s drawbacks, boasting new tools, enhanced editorial features, and better internal application management. The changes bring the software much closer to fulfilling its considerable promise and advance InDesign into the realm of mature software.

Tooling Up
The original InDesign toolset boasted the standard complement of selection tools found in PageMaker and QuarkXPress, but notably featured the addition of the crowd-pleasing Adobe pen tool. With the 1.5 release, Adobe apparently felt compelled to push the toolset even further. Now appearing on the InDesign 1.5 Tools palette are the Pencil tools, Type on a Path tool, and the Eyedropper tool.

  • Pencil tools: The Pencil, Smooth, and Eraser tools all work identically to those found in Illustrator, allowing you to sketch and refine freeform paths without leaving your document.
  • The Path Type tool is tucked away in the Type tool pullout and can also be accessed via the Object menu. This new tool actually puts Illustrator’s Path Type tool to shame, providing five different effects and automatic vertical centering to the path.
  • The Eyedropper tool is incredibly useful, and one of my favorite inclusions. This tool, too, gets much of its behavior from its Illustrator counterpart, allowing you to sample the style of a graphic or text and apply it to others, but InDesign’s version goes one better: It can be swiped on a particular word of text and then applied onto another section of text — great for quick local formatting. InDesign also does away with the Eyedropper/Paintbucket switching routine, instead favoring a simpler process of automatically toggling between an empty Eyedropper and a filled one.

We’re not sure if the Path Type and Eyedropper tools are vital to a publisher’s day-to-day needs, but we do think that as people get to know InDesign, these tools will quickly become among the more frequently used in the palette. These additions make InDesign a much more powerful and versatile product by offering new options to speed the workflow process.

Smarter Editing Features
One of the things many of us learn when working on ridiculous deadlines is to prepare our work for last-minute changes. Taking advantage of Master Pages, Styles, and Threaded Stories, you can create a built-in, fail-safe system for handling last-minute change requests, such as that all headlines change to red and all body copy go down a point size. These features all worked well in InDesign 1.0, but with version 1.5, Adobe adds even more robust editorial features designed especially for those afflicted by clients with a “shifting aesthetic.”

  • Text Frames can be filled with placeholder text (greeking) from a simple command.
  • Text can be easily changed to different casing: ALL CAPS, lowercase, Title Case, Sentence case.
  • Special characters can be inserted to allow for column, frame, or page breaks. They can also be included in tabs to specify an absolute right indent or to indent to a certain point.
  • You can automatically create smart jump lines. One of the features that should have always been in QuarkXPress finally shows up within InDesign. You create a story on page 2 that continues on page 5. Now you create a jump line, “Continues on Page 5,” that will automatically update itself if the pages are shuffled.

Eliminate Repetitive Task Syndrome
If the computer is meant to help you work, why is it that you often find yourself helping it? InDesign now helps out in some of these cases. You can fully script the application either through AppleScript for Macintosh and Visual Basic for Windows. Once you get your various Print and PDF settings just right, you can save them so that you don’t have to weed through ten dialog boxes of settings every time you want to print to your color printer.

InDesign 1.5 streamlines the image-masking process by reading the clipping paths or Alpha Channels on files imported from Photoshop, and by offering its own automatic edge detection for images that don’t already have masks. Service bureaus may be a little more accepting of InDesign files since they now include built-in trapping of text, InDesign objects, and imported bitmaps.

Asking A Lot from Us?
With all these great new features you may be wondering about the system requirements. The application still requires a speed demon of a computer with buckets o’ installed RAM. It may seem hard to rationalize the purchase of a brand-new G4 just to run InDesign, but that or a fairly recent PC is about what it will take if you want snappy performance. Even if you do have a G4 or newer PC, be prepared for the occasional painfully slow screen redraw. Overall the application runs smoothly, but at seemingly random times it will temporarily slow to a crawl. We hope Adobe will address these speed and resource issues within future releases.

When InDesign 1.5 first came out, the Macintosh version would not print to anything but a Postscript printer. Recognizing that many of us get along fine with our non-Postscript inkjet printers, Adobe has removed this thorn from InDesign’s side by supplying a free beta of a Non-Postscript Printing component.

InSummary
With this release Adobe has gained incredible ground on QuarkXPress. Adobe has matched in most cases and bettered in some the feature set offered by QuarkXPress 4.0.x. Layers, a real Pen tool, multiple undos, a worthwhile dictionary that includes various languages, and a multi-line composer have always set InDesign in front of XPress in some respects. It was the shortcomings of InDesign 1.0 and its lack of feature parity to XPress that overshadowed these highlights. And now that these blemishes have been removed, InDesign can truly be judged for what it is — a next-generation publishing tool. Now let’s hope Adobe can do something about InDesign’s steep hardware and resource requirements as well as the software’s intermittent sluggishness.

  • anonymous says:

    Thanks for good review. I’ve been watching InDesign and playing with the demo versions. Your review echoed many of my own thoughts, but you’d also spotted a few things I hadn’t found.

    While your concern over processor/RAM requirements is real, I think it’s best to simply let improving technology take care of that. A 400MHz+ G4 with 128MB RAM will be a normal desktop machine within a year.

    Thank you!

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