What's New in InDesign 2027

InDesign 2027 is here and if you’re wondering if you should upgrade, well, the answer is a little complicated. Some of the new features are good and some, well, we’ll let you decide for yourself. Either way, we have you covered.

In today’s episode, David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepción are here to give you the good, the frustrating, and the what was Adobe thinking with InDesign 2027. So if you use InDesign and want to know what’s worth trying now and what you want to wait on, this episode will get you caught up. I’m Theresa Jackson and this is the CreativePro Podcast.

Hey, design friends, welcome to the CreativePro podcast. I’m happy you’re here. Before we jump in, I want to share a discount code for you.

Use PODCAST to save $15 on a one-year CreativePro membership or $100 on an upcoming CreativePro event. And we’ve only got one online event left this year. Of course, it’s the InDesign Conference, December 1st through the 4th.

And if you use InDesign, you should be there. David will kick off the conference with a session demonstrating all the new features, followed by a whole lineup of InDesign experts. You’ll get four days of InDesign deep dives.

Visit CreativePro Events for all the details. Welcome to the CreativePro podcast. Anne-Marie, I’m so excited to see you in person.

We have not done one of these podcasts in eons. Yes, months at least. And it’s really great to be back in the recording studio.

I love it. And I can see your smiling face on my laptop. And you’re wearing the shirt that I recognize from so many conferences.

That’s right. And we’re both in red, so that’s good. Oh, yeah, that’s true.

Reddish, red dust or rust or something. I really wanted to start off by saying welcome to the InDesign Secrets podcast because we did do that for 20 years. We’re going to talk about what’s new in InDesign 2027, which just even that number is really 2027? 2027, yeah.

We’ve been doing InDesign. We’ve been covering InDesign for literally decades now. Yeah.

Well, I remember celebrating the 20th anniversary of InDesign. Yeah. That wasn’t too long ago.

Yeah, 2019. And now, this week as we’re releasing this, Adobe MAX is on and they’ve just released InDesign 2027 and we want to talk about it. And I figured this would be a great opportunity.

So tell me everything that you know about InDesign 2027. Well, I actually think this is kind of a dastardly plot of yours, David, is to invite me on this podcast when I told you time and time again, I don’t think I’ve booted up InDesign more than twice in the past year. And I’m still a member of the beta program, but I just kind of read the messages and I go, what a nightmare.

And then I go on to something else, you know, and I haven’t been keeping up with InDesign. And I’ve gotten requests for training and I’ve given most of them to Chad and to Lori Ruhlin. And so they’re all even taking care of any of my business stuff.

Why? Remind people, for those who have known Anne-Marie for, again, decades, remind them. So what have you been doing if you’re not using InDesign? Did you decide to become a Canva user or did you? Affinity all the way, baby. Yeah, see, I still know some of the words.

Yeah. You know, I officially retired in January of this year. That’s when I decide, OK, I’m not taking on any more jobs and I’m not doing any more videos.

I’m not doing any more webinars, no more speaking engagements because I’m done. I’m just done with it. You know, I’ve been doing it for 40 years or so.

And since I moved out here to California three years ago now, I have sort of I’m developing a rich alternative reality here so that, you know, nobody knows anything about InDesign in the crowds that I run with. And when I wear my Adobe sweatshirt, they’re like, oh, do you work for Adobe? Do you? My Adobe keeps quitting. And I’m like, no.

And then I change the subject, you know. Right. So I’ve been doing lots of stuff here in Pleasant Hill, California, which is right outside of San Francisco.

I love that you’re saying that that this is your alternate reality, because in reality, that is that is real reality. All this InDesign stuff. This is the alternate reality.

Yes. Yes, that’s it. And I feel for you guys.

I do. I feel deeply for you guys in your struggle. And I wish the best with that.

And I still think it’s the coolest program ever. And I do. I have booted up occasionally, but not to create anything, mainly just to have a place where I can assemble photos and stuff, because I refuse to open up Photoshop and barely open up Illustrator.

Wow. After that, I can take once in a while, but. That is amazing.

What a change. No, I love that you’re doing it, but I really do appreciate you jumping on the call because it’s been too long since we’ve talked. Yeah.

And the goal here is not for you to tell me, but more for me to tell you. Yeah, I would love to hear what’s new with InDesign. I’m not going to be doing Max.

They asked me to do Max, but I said, no, no more this year. Like you asked me to do CreativePro Week, no more this year. And so I don’t know what is new in InDesign.

I mean, I’ve read little snippets here and there, but I’m really looking forward to what you’re going to say. So I appreciate it. I love that you’re here doing that.

And struggle, you mentioned struggles, the struggles we’re going through. Those are real. We are going through all kinds of struggles and InDesign 2027 is not necessarily going to make them better.

Maybe in some places, there are definitely some ways that they’ve improved the product, but there’s other ways that are, I’ll tell you, I really think they should be shipping this with a big jar of Aleve or Advil or Tylenol or something. There’s some interesting stuff going on on the InDesign development. And so we’ll get into that and talk about what’s good and what’s not.

And it’ll be kind of a download. Have they done any incremental changes to 2026 recently? Have they fixed anything? They have. And actually, that’s a really good point.

They have been releasing a few things along the way through the year, which I think is pretty cool. And I will tell you, I don’t entirely remember which version, you know, how there’s like a February and a June. But I do want to point out, and we’ll put links in the show notes about the James Womzer’s great document that he keeps up.

It’s a Publish Online, so you can go look at it in your browser. And it’s a great document for pointing out what came out when. Publish Online is still a thing.

Publish Online is still a thing. They haven’t taken much out in recent years. The Learn panel, I think, disappeared.

There used to be a Learn button. I remember that. I do remember that.

Nobody used it. So they took that out. But they keep adding stuff.

And so let’s, and we’ll put a link to James’s thing so you can figure out exactly what happened when. But I will point out, some of the features that you may have missed along the way are, like a couple of years ago, they added full HTML5 export. Yes, I remember that.

So that was really helpful because you could get a whole page looking just the way it was. They added the in-copy on the web is still a beta feature. They’re still working on, you know, text editing in a web browser, which is interesting.

They added the ability to do math expressions. We know that, although I’m having some trouble with it, and the ability to open PDFs. I mean, we talked a year ago, I think, about the math expressions and how kind of funky it was.

And can you still open up, you can still open up PDFs and edit them directly in InDesign? You can. Have they improved that at all? They have. Yeah, I remember the beginning was horrible.

It was terrible. And then they made a big improvement maybe six months down the line, but I don’t know. I haven’t looked at it since.

It is getting better. And let me know if I’m freezing because my camera is kind of freaking out a little bit. That’s good to know.

What do we got here? So they’ve been adding a bunch of different things in there. They did add earlier this year, there was one of these little micro releases where they added the ability to align to the bleed. Like, you know, you’ve been able to lead a line to the margins or line to the edge of the page.

Now you can align to the bleed, which actually turns out to be really helpful in print situations because you often want to get something to the… I kept aligning to the edge of the page and then you have to go in like, just push it a little bit further. Push it over a bit. Now you can just align to bleed.

That’s useful. The big one for me that they added earlier this year was an improvement to data merge. I was going to ask about that.

They have not touched data merge in, I don’t know how long, a long time. All of a sudden there was this release where it added support for UTF-8, which is great because if you’ve ever done a data merge import and like all these characters are messed up, like wipe those characters, especially like Concepcion with an accent. Right.

Concepcion would always break because in the old style, now it imports UTF-8 properly. So all those accents come in. So it’s a little thing, but that’s huge.

The other thing that was driving me crazy forever is if you have a CSV that has a cell, like in Excel, if you’ve got one cell that has multiple paragraphs, that would break. There’s no way to handle that. You could only do like one paragraph per cell.

Now they have the ability to import CSVs that have multiple paragraphs. So you could put a whole page of text inside a single cell, which is awesome. Well, that’s stupendous.

That’s stupendous because I know a lot of people love data merge and they couldn’t do their jobs without it. I’m sure that these changes are really welcome for them. They really are.

They really, really are. So they’ve added a few of those things along the way, which is great. This came out before 2027.

But now in InDesign 2027, which is InDesign version 22, 22, 25? I don’t know. 22 or 23, I thought. I don’t know.

Oh, I could tell. I could go to… Remember, because in InDesign, you could just go to the About InDesign. 22.

I chose About InDesign. 2027 is 22? 2027 is 22. Okay.

And this is… Oh, this is interesting. This is, I think, officially like behind the scenes CreativePro Podcast number 22. Yes.

The stars are in alignment. We are… The stars are in alignment. So true.

Anyway, in InDesign 22, which is 2027, they did add a few things that I think are great. One is we finally got… These are just a few little things that I think are great. And then there’s a bunch of other stuff, which I think is problematic.

I’ll talk about that in a second. Illustrator, I think the last version of Illustrator, dramatically improved the font menu. So you can find fonts better.

There’s a lot more features in there. And they have now added it. As far as I can tell, it’s the same.

Everything’s pretty much the same in InDesign. And I love that. The ability to find your fonts quickly to be able to… Oh, that would be really useful.

Maybe I’ll go ahead. I’ll upgrade just to see how that works. Just for that, you should upgrade.

One of the best… And you will like this part. They’ve really integrated the font menu with Creative Cloud Libraries better. And you’ve always been a proponent of… HTC Libraries.

So you can now see all your libraries that spec fonts in the font menu. You just click on my libraries and it says, oh, here’s all the ones that have fonts in there. Choose a library.

And then you can choose a font right out of a library without having to go mess around with your panels or anything. So right in the font menu. I love that.

You can even add fonts to your Creative Cloud Libraries from in there without even having to activate them. So you could just say, I’m looking for… You could make a new library. Right.

Like you’re setting something up for a team or something. You want to make sure everybody has access to those fonts. Or you’re not sure which of these 15 fonts you’re going to want to use, but you can go add, add, add, add.

And then all at once, just activate them and they’ll all get downloaded. So I really like that. And there’s more ability to kind of look for fonts inside Adobe Fonts.

Like if you go to the Adobe Fonts webpage, and there’s all these different filters. Like I want a cursive font with a low X height. They’ve basically built all of that into InDesign now.

So if you’re looking for a font, you don’t always have to go out to the Creative Cloud app. So I like that. This is one of those little things.

That could be really, really helpful. I like it. If you’re completely invested in those, in Adobe Fonts.

I was just reading a nightmare thing on Reddit from this woman who… I might’ve been a guy, but she… The company designed like a 300 page catalog or something like that. And in white toward the end of production, suddenly all of the fonts were breaking the top part of the text frame. And they couldn’t figure out why.

And so she posted the question to Reddit. And it turns out it had nothing to do with baseline shift or anything like that. It had to do that Adobe tweaked the font.

I heard something about that. Did you hear that? And then they automatically got an updated font. No warning.

And they had to change the baseline offset. That fixed the problem. Luckily there was easy fix, but yeah.

I’m glad to say that’s very rare. I mean, it’s really rare that they would change the metrics of a font, but wow. Yeah.

That’s scary. That was a scary one. Yeah.

It’s one of those things that… I mean, another thing that has happened in the past, and again, it’s very rare, is you lay out a document using Adobe Fonts and then the font developer, the foundry says, oh, we’re going to pull our font out of Adobe Fonts and it disappears. And now you don’t have access unless you go track it down and then you buy it from the font developer. Again, that’s rare.

Yeah, rare. I mean, I was a huge user of Adobe Fonts when I was developing projects. It’s amazing.

Yeah. It’s such a value proposition. Or just use Helvetica and Times New Roman.

You could… that’d be an option too. Let me talk about some other new stuff. This is another one for Anne-Marie.

All right. You were a Parallels user for a bazillion years. Yeah, it keeps telling me to update Parallels.

I’m like, I don’t care about Parallels. Not anymore. But if you’re trying to run Windows stuff on your Mac, you’re going to want Parallels.

And InDesign has not worked on Parallels, I don’t think, for several years because… Oh, that’s right. Yes, you’re right. Because Parallels emulates an ARM processor.

And InDesign was not… Or maybe it worked, but it was just really clunky. InDesign only emulated a leg processor and kept saying, come on, man, no problem. Exactly.

Now you get an ARM and a leg. So it’s working on ARM processors now. That is great news.

That is great news. I remember you telling me… It’s been a long time. I remember you telling me and I was like, I’m just not even going to get Parallels now.

So now I might. Well, now I was doing a lot of training and I was teaching a group of PC users. Or like with the InCopy training, 50% of the time, half the people that you’re teaching are on Windows and the other half are on Mac.

And it was such a pleasure to be able to switch back and forth in InDesign and InCopy. And all the students were like, wow, look at that. That’s so cool.

And then it stopped. I couldn’t do it for like the past two years. So I haven’t tried it.

I don’t have Parallels installed. So I just I’m letting you know that you can come out of retirement because Parallels works in Parallels now. All right, two more little, three more little things that they added.

OK. This is one of my favorites because, you know, I use scripts all the time. Yes.

So I have lots and lots of scripts on my machine. They now added a search field in the scripts panel. It’s a little thing, but you just.

Oh, where is that useful? So useful. Yeah. They added a search field inside the scripts panel and you’ll get this.

They finally added a search field inside the edit keyboard shortcuts dialog box. You know what? Right. Because, you know, it’s good because in the old days, you’d have to like click show all and it would open a notebook or text editor.

Yes. And you’d be like, where is that? Where is that? And now there’s just a search. It’s the most obvious thing.

It’s a little thing, but they finally added a search field. So I like that. OK, last one that I really like FlexLayout.

Yes. FlexLayout is a relative still a relatively new feature. They had just introduced that when I was making.

Yeah, I mean, it’s been just, you know, the past year they’re trying to get people to use it. And I will tell you, I don’t know anybody who’s using FlexLayout for real work. Yeah.

In fact, on LinkedIn, on our LinkedIn, you know, the InDesign Secrets group on LinkedIn. Was it Rainer? Somebody asked, is anyone? Yeah, I think it was Rainer Kluder. Is anyone really using this? And everyone was like, well, I’ve been testing it.

And well, I’ve been I demoed it. It’s like, no, no, no. Is anybody using it in work? And no, nobody is using it for work.

Well, it’s a solution in search of a problem. It is. It is.

That said, I still think it’s cool. I think it’s a really cool idea. The idea that you can put a bunch of objects inside of a Flex container and then it’ll just flow in a grid or it’ll flow up or down.

If you change the grid, if you change the object, everything reflows inside of it. It works like a like a like a web page where you can make the window smaller. Exactly.

Larger and everything just sort of flows into the right locations. If you set the rules up right. Don’t you have to set some rules and stuff? That’s right.

It literally came, the technology came from web design, from Flex containers. And it’s, yeah, it’s responsive design, kind of, at least reflowing inside InDesign. And I think it’s really cool.

Here’s the biggest problem with it is you can’t thread from one page to another. There’s just one container. So if you’re doing one page with a bunch of objects on it, it could be interesting.

Or a column. But it doesn’t work well. You can’t do it across the pages.

So it’s still a work in progress. That said, they added some features to it in 2027, which make it, if you’re going to try it, it makes it even more interesting. One of them is auto size.

So now if you put in text frames, here’s an example. You have a stack of four text frames vertical in a column. Kind of like a classified ads, like the old classified ads.

Let’s say you’ve got a column of a bunch of text frames. And you put them all in a Flex container in one big column, or multiple columns even. You could set those frames to auto grow, right? The auto size inside text frame options.

You go to text frame options, turn on auto size. And then as you add or remove text from each one, all the others in the column move to make space. Nice.

Right? So again, if you had something like classified ads, some classifieds are going to be longer, some are going to be shorter. And you could basically edit the text to fill the column properly. And they’ll all rearrange.

Can it also, do you have the option to change the size of the font? Yeah. Yeah, sure. It’s just a regular text frame.

Make it as big as I mean, auto resize the font size. No, no, thank you. No.

But you know, Photoshop added that feature. It says this is, this is the worst feeling when Photoshop gets a feature before InDesign, like a type feature. Yeah.

Like what the? That’s not, no, that’s not nice. It’s wrong. No.

Yeah. You’re absolutely, we will. It’s exactly right.

They have the underpinnings, right? For adjust layout can do that. When you tell it to adjust layout, you can have it also change the size of the font when it’s changing the side of the text frames. Yeah.

Yeah. I guess that’s true. I mean, it’s similar.

We learned a few things. Yeah. But yeah, I would love, just make a frame and put some text in and say, just make the text bigger, smaller.

No, they don’t do that. They don’t. Okay.

But at least they did something for 2027. Great. I’m sorry, but that should be the t-shirt.

That’s the low. That’s the motto. At least they did something.

At least they did something. There are some good things. We’ve talked about some good things.

At least they keep working on it. They are trying to make this better. But then there’s all these things that are like, why? What did you? What were you thinking? And I’ll tell you.

Oh, I’m sorry. I’m going to add one more. I forgot it from my list.

One more good thing. It’s a little thing. You can now select a bunch of pages or spreads in the pages panel and then right click and choose export these pages.

And so you know how that you used to have to remember like, okay, export page 1, 5 through 7. So now it just feels in that field for you based on whatever’s selected. Okay. That’s all.

It’s a little thing. Okay. Then there’s all these other features that they added.

And they all have, have you ever heard of AI? I was just going to say that. I was going like AI, AI below the screen. Because I knew you were going to say that.

I’m sorry. You know, it is such a great candidate for some artificial intelligence or something like that. Because I remember griping about how PowerPoint had that thing.

You just put a bunch of text in with bullet points and PowerPoint could say, how about this design? How about that design? Yes. Yeah. There for like four or five years at least.

I don’t know how long, but, but still, yes. A couple of years. It feels like a long time.

No AI. Look, we know that everyone at Adobe, every team at Adobe, at Adobe needs to add AI to their features. We know this is a command from on high.

Yeah. But the features that they’ve added are not optimal. Or let’s just say they have a lot of room for improvement, really.

They’re trying. But the things that they’re trying are problematic. They’re really not that good.

They added, we’ve seen this in Photoshop and Illustrator, and now in InDesign, AI assistant. So the AI assistant is like your intern inside the program. Hey, AI assistant, can you do something? And you type in and you give it a little prompt and you’d ask it to do something.

Can you rename my layers? Could you, and here’s the thing. Kind of like Claude, kind of like something like that, right? Yeah, yeah. But it knows InDesign and it knows how to do stuff in InDesign.

The problem is right now it’s painfully slow. Oh. It usually works okay.

Although it sometimes takes a while. You have to do multiple prompts. So it becomes a conversation and it does stuff.

And each time you do something, it takes maybe 30 seconds or a minute or a couple of minutes, right? And that doesn’t sound like that long. But when you’re trying to lay out the page, it’s like so… Now, interestingly, you can keep working while it’s thinking. And it’ll do stuff while you’re working.

It’s almost like two people working on the document, which is kind of neat. But it’s, yeah, it’s slow. And then it just sometimes completely breaks in weird, uncomfortable ways.

So great idea. I love the idea of being able to ask stuff, but it’s still a problem. Now, I do want to say I’ve used it for a few things now that are, even though it takes a while, it’s clear it would take me longer to do manually.

Okay, well, that’s good. So there are times when you’re like, okay. So for example, I had a situation, I had a document, long document, and I needed, there was a frame on each page, like in all the even pages, I needed to move.

I needed to move a certain frame on all the even pages over like an inch. And in this case, I hadn’t used object styles, which my bad. It wasn’t set up for on a parent page.

It was literally, there were just all of these frames and they all, and I could have gone to the page and moved it, gone to the next page and moved it. Right, right. I could have come up with a script maybe to do it.

But in this case, I just went to AI Assistant. I said, on all the odd pages, move the graphic frames over by half inch. Okay.

And it chugged away for 40 seconds or something. And then it did it. And it was like, okay, that was faster than I could have done it.

That’s good. Okay. So there’s, when you have something that’s going to take you a while to do manually, I think there might be, there might be, I mean, I was playing around with another, just for a silly thing, change.

I wanted to apply a character style to every other character in a whole story. Right, so it would just, that would take forever. That’d be horrible.

Yes, that’s true. Right, it didn’t take that long. Again, 30, 45 seconds and boom, it applied the character style to every other character, ignoring the spaces.

I mean, it was pretty clever. So that kind of thing, when it’s going to take you a while, I think there’s a use case, but they need to speed it up. They really do.

They really, really do. They added a feature called check document, which is fascinating. It shows up in the window menu and the file menu.

They’re starting to add things both in multiple places because otherwise they think you might not find them. Check document is an interesting idea where it’s almost like, we have a preflight panel. I was just going to say, isn’t it like, is it like preflight? It’s like preflight, but apparently they couldn’t make preflight do what they want and so they added a whole other feature.

It would be better to do this in preflight, but it’s not in preflight. So now you have to use preflight and then you’ve got check document. Check document will find things more like grammar mistakes or, hey, this image, it’s really good at finding images that don’t have alt text.

Okay. Maybe. Can you write a script that does something like this? All of this stuff.

You could write scripts for all of this. I mean, not the check, not check grammar or that kind of thing. Not check grammar, but something like a very thorough check document, I thought.

But it’s so clunky. Are you still in conversations with the team there in India? I mean, do they ever ask you about what do you think of this or ask the beta people? Yeah, I mean, it comes up, but here’s the thing. I really feel like they’re adding, they have to add all these AI features and I feel like they’re saying, look, this is just version one.

It’s going to get better. These will get better and they probably will get better, but it’s so frustrating when you have a 1.0 or it feels like a 0.1 product. Yeah, I mean, it’s not finished and they’re adding it to the product and we’re all like, that’s half-baked.

That’s just not there. So it’s frustrating. But as you said, at least they did something.

Yeah, that’s true. At least there’s something going on. Yeah, you’re right.

So the check document is very problematic. I honestly don’t see anybody using it. I don’t think anyone’s going to use this soon.

But if they improve it and if it really starts helping, it’s an interesting idea. I tell you a check document that I will point out, and this is not a commercial plug, but PageProof, they’ve been a sponsor of ours for a long time, but PageProof has an AI feature, which they’re calling PI, page intelligence, but of course I like it because it’s pie, right? And so they’ve got this feature that lets you check your document based in all kinds of incredibly powerful ways. Here’s my brand guidelines.

Check the document to see if it matches my brand guidelines. Wow. Oh my gosh.

That’s very nice. Is it using the right fonts? Is it using the right colors? It’s crazy good. You would just upload your document and then it would analyze it? Yeah, yeah.

Nice. It’s shocking. Anyway, that’s what I’m hoping Adobe’s check document someday will get to, but it’s so basic at this point.

So we’ll see. We’ll see what happens. They also added, actually this came out a few months ago, the ability to rewrite stories in InDesign, like, hey, you’ve got a story, but it’s too long, so shorten it for me.

And it uses AI to shorten it or lengthen. I remember asking for that as a feature a few years ago. Yeah, I honestly… That would be a smart use of AI.

I did too, but now that I’ve seen it and played with it, I’m not sure I really want it anymore. I feel, first of all, there’s actually a feature called fit text and it will try and fit to the size of, but it doesn’t, it never works. You know, it’s always like a line off and too long, too short.

So I don’t know, it’s just broken. But then the thing is, it’s rewriting your text. I mean, it’s a great idea, except it’s rewriting your text and somebody spent a lot of time writing that text.

Who cares? You know, you can make it… You’re just a writer. You’ve got to get this job out the door. It’s, I think there’s times when that might be true, but I’m… Does it turn on track changes when it does that? No, that would not be great.

Yeah, that would be useful. That would, yeah. Tell me what you changed.

Oh, I like that. Right, and the color, it could be like a little robot, you know? I changed it. The robot changed.

This is what the robot changed. Yeah. That’s actually a really good idea.

So the shorten, lengthen, make it more academic, make it more comfortable. I mean, all of those things, things that Claude has been doing and Chachapiti and Gemini, all these things can do that, make it more colloquial. Now that’s built into InDesign.

I do think that there’s going to be a subset of InDesign users who are going to be like, okay, that’s perfect. That’s just what it is. I think it’s mostly the less professional users.

I think a lot of the enterprise companies are going to be like, yeah, we can’t, no way, can’t change that. It’s kind of like the alt text. The fact that InDesign will now automatically, when you import a graphic, this has been going on all year.

I think I’ve been reading about that. Oh, I hate this. I hate this so much.

It automatically does alt text, right? Yeah. But didn’t they add something in preferences where you could turn that off? Uh-huh. Okay.

Yeah, finally, they added, you can turn it off, but you have to know to turn it off. And most people are just like, yeah, something’s happening. And then all that alt text gets exported in your PDFs.

So a robot, an AI is making alt text to describe your images and then it’s going into your PDFs and you don’t, you probably don’t know it’s there. Right. That’s not good, especially when it gets it wrong.

Exactly. What if it was a screenshot of like a social security statement? It’s a social security statement showing a social security number 555-321-5633. Could be, yeah.

Yeah, we do auto-recognize of text and numbers and you don’t know. I hope it’s smart enough to, but it has gotten some things hilariously wrong because sometimes it can’t know. It’s gotten a lot better, but it’s still, I have some real problems with that.

There is also- There’s some changes in 2027 as far as alt text is concerned. Okay, so it’s gotten better. It is better quality in 2027.

They finally fixed the bug where if you have a white image, like a white logo on a dark background, couldn’t see it. And so it always broke. The alt text was always wrong because it didn’t know what the white image was.

Can it do alt text for a white logo on a white background? No? Yeah. Polar bear on the dark pole. It just says, you can’t see this.

It cannot, it’s, I don’t know. Well, it’s gotten better. Okay.

It also, they did add the feature in preferences that you can not just turn it off, but you can remove all of it in one, like click a button and it all goes away. Again, but you have to know it’s there. It’s kind of, it’s sneaky that way.

Anyway, so they’ve added all these features. It’s gotten, it’s better. It’s worse.

It’s sideways. You know, at least they’re doing something. And I, oh, the other thing that they’re working on, and I think this is public.

This is the one I worry about. And this is the big one. This is the big extra.

They’re coming out with a beta or I think it’s going to be in public beta. Gosh, I really hope so at this point, which allows more than one person to edit an InDesign document at the same time. Ah, that would be great.

Right. Cause we’re all used to Google docs now or Microsoft 365. Microsoft Word, yeah.

Right. Just open it and you’ve got multiple people working on it. This has been the dream at Adobe for years.

They’ve been working on this for years. It’s really, really hard. You have to save your document in the cloud.

It’s a cloud InDesign document. That’s been in there for a while. And now they’re going to start allowing, just as a beta, what would it look like to have more than one person using it? Do the users have to download it to their desktop or do they work on it in the cloud? Oh, I’m sorry.

No, it is. That’s a great question. I think the answer is yes, both.

Okay. I think technically it’s probably downloading. It’s not in a web browser.

So it must be downloading it to like a temp folder. Yeah, that’s how basically how the cloud docs work. It downloads it, you work on it.

And then when you save it, it kind of syncs it. Okay. So E all of the above.

Well, it’s good that they’re working on it. That’s great. And I hope it is a public release.

It’s going to take a while to get out there, but it is, you know, there’s a lot of effort to improve in design. We get that. I just wish they didn’t have so much AI or at least, I mean, AI, I want the AI, but I want it.

Like you said, give me variations on a theme. I don’t like this design, mix it up for me. That, you know, that could be interesting.

Maybe we’ll get there. But this, I don’t know. Is there any more integration with the other apps? Are there other apps? You know, the creative cloudiness of it all.

No, no, they have not as far. Oh, I’m sorry. There is more integration with Adobe Express.

So, and that’s actually interesting. They’re getting there. Again, I feel like there’s so much that’s half baked.

Yeah. So like you can have an image because Adobe Express can do so much cool things with images, for example, like remove the background if you want to do a silhouette, change the colors. It’s not as like Photoshop-y things.

Yes. That Express can do really quickly. So you can select an image and edit it in Express, but it only works on certain images, certain file types.

Like if you have a JPEG RGB image, I believe it’ll do it, but you can’t bring it back in because it’s a JPEG and the JPEG doesn’t have a transparent background. So it’s lacking some smarts. Like, oh gosh, now you have a transparent background.

We better re-save it as a PNG or a PSD. There needs to be some smarts built in. And right now it’s just not very smart.

It just isn’t. So in the right scenario, when you’ve got the right file format and the right color, it’s all only RGB, which kind of that bothers me too. Okay.

Even though I’m a big believer in working in RGB. Yes. There needs to be a way to use CMYK.

Yes. And it’s just, they haven’t thought through all the angles yet. But they’re trying to make it, Express is kind of cloud, what do you call it? Creative cloudy.

Creative cloudy, yeah. Cloud-esque. So it’s, you know, it’s something.

Okay. I, I’m not, I’m ringing endorsement, Mr. Blattner, of Hatman Design 2027. I want it.

I’m disappointed. And it’s a little depressing. I know, I know.

We remember the days when they introduced Flash, you know, or they introduced all these cool things when they came up with data merge for the first time. It’s like, I don’t think that there’s, they don’t have a skunkworks kind of team working on adding something that nobody has even asked for yet. That’s incredible.

Well, I would, I would put, if they can get, if they can get simultaneous collaborative editing of InDesign documents, that would fall, that would fall into that. That has been the skunkworks project for a bazillion years. It’s, it’s, but that’s a deep rewrite from very low level.

Yeah. It’s hard. I agree with you though.

There aren’t, there aren’t those kinds of flashy, fabulous features that make people want to go, wow, I have to upgrade today. By the way, if you are tempted to upgrade today, don’t. I mean, not you, not anyone listening here.

Don’t, please. Never upgrade. Oh, right.

When they come out with 20, don’t upgrade to a 22.0. Wait, please wait until 22.1 or something, you know is coming. Right. Let, let other people be the guinea pigs.

You don’t. Yes. Yeah.

You’re smart enough to be. Don’t switch. You know, if you’re in the middle of creating a document in 21, don’t upgrade to 22 and then open that up, let it update and then go on your way.

Start fresh in a new document with the new version. Yeah. So, or at least export the other one to IDML and then open it up.

Yeah. Or, or, you know, do a save as, be careful, have it back up. You know, be, it’s, you all are listening or watching this podcast right now because you’re smart and you’re not going to make the mistakes that all those other people.

Let the other people make the mistake of updating right away. You can, you know, take a moment, take a breath. Same thing with the operating systems, right? We’ve been saying this for years.

That’s true. Just because they operate, just because Apple or Windows says, yes, we have an update, it doesn’t mean you have to say yes. Good old Windows 7. That’s what I’m running.

So, anyway, well, I, thank you for listening to my diatribe here. You’re right. It is a little disappointing and, but at least they’re doing something.

They’re doing something. They haven’t abandoned the product. You know, think of what it would feel to be a Dreamweaver user.

You know, it’s like, do they even mention Dreamweaver anymore? And I think it’s still a live product as far as I know. I don’t even know. Gosh.

You have to look into that. At least there’s a team working on it and they’re, you know, debuting new stuff. XD.

What about XD? I mean, all the effort that people put into learning XD, and that was going to take over the world. Yeah. How about Muse? Yeah.

Yeah, Muse. But anyway. Now everyone thinks Muse is a Zuckerberg meta thing.

I keep hearing that in the news. I’m like, that’s not Muse. Adobe is Muse.

What are you talking about? Right, right. I wonder how much you paid Adobe for that. What are you doing at Max? I am.

What did you do at Max? I’m speaking, I’m doing InDesign Tips and Tricks. I’m focusing on, it’s kind of like the session that you and I used to do. It’s a session all about things that you didn’t even realize InDesign can do.

Okay. So talking about that. Now, I will say I’m also doing this kind of session, but I’m going to go into even more detail of what’s new in InDesign 2027 at the InDesign conference, which is in a few weeks.

Ah, yes. The InDesign conference. The online InDesign conference? All online.

Okay. All online. And I’m going to be going into more depth of what’s new in 2027.

I’ll demo it. We’ll actually show it and look at some of the examples and what you can do. Okay.

Look at some of the math expressions, things that they added that I didn’t get, have a chance to go into. So that’s all coming. That’s going to be an amazing show.

The InDesign conference, you know, I mean, we- Yes. That is the best of the best of all InDesign users and groupies and teachers. And sponsors.

Yeah, that’s supposed to be. We just love geeking out on InDesign. That’s still our happy place.

Yeah. So join us there. That’s going to be fun.

And then of course, there’s CreativePro Week next year. I shouldn’t be doing all this stuff, but you know, I’m so excited. We’re already planning CreativePro Week 2027.

Yeah, 2027. That’s in Phoenix. In Phoenix.

Yeah. Okay. All right.

Good. Back in Phoenix. So I love that.

Anyway, lots of good stuff happening. And then I’m just going to throw out here. We have some other tricks up our sleeve or something coming up here.

You have some stunt works of yourself. We do have our own, which I’m really excited about. Okay.

Because it’s all in the area of online training. I’m just going to say it. We’re going to be doing courses.

We’re going to be doing courses through CreativePro. The best of the best courses to learn all kinds of cool stuff. Good for you.

From beginner to advanced. And I’m super excited. I remember talking about that with you for years about rolling it out.

And I’m happy to hear it’s finally going to be happening. It’s happening, Emery. It’s happening.

Excellent. It’s amazing, but it’s happening. I love it.

So good stuff to come. And we’ll be talking more about that. And we’ll have you back on.

And I’ll tell you all the new stuff. I would love that. I would love it.

Thank you so much, David, for inviting me back. It was good. It was good to talk.

It’s awesome. And it feels good to talk with all the listeners too. I miss you guys.

We miss you. We really do. We really do.

But I’m so happy that you’re having a real, a reality experience. Yeah. Yeah.

That’s great. Wonderful. With the little ones and everything.

I just, all the family. Yeah. It’s all good.

It’s great. Okay. Thank you so much, Anne-Marie.

It’s great to see you. Talk to you later.