Reply To: InDesign CC 2017

I remember being so excited about the CS3 and CS5 releases because they had so many small, thoughtful enhancements that made my life as a newspaper/magazine/book designer so much easier. Put another way, the last time I was excited about an InDesign upgrade was in 2010.

I’d love to see some more finely grained logic added to Paragraph Styles, recognizing that there are plug-ins that do accomplish these goals.

I’d love to see scripting demystified and a little easier. They save me hours on my newspaper workflow but I’ve developed them with raw, brute force.

I’d love to see the ability to have a paragraph style with rules around all four edges of either the width of the text or the column. By the way, Ventura Publisher could do this in 1986. And certainly the ability to define a color behind a style is a welcome addition to CC2015, but the workaround posted on to make that a rule is as extreme as it is freakin’ ingenious.

I’d love to define the basis of a Paragraph Style using a Character Style (an option in Quark since 4.0). Anne-Marie posted a workaround for that in 2006, I believe, using nested styles, but it’s hard to get to for editing, and it got in my way. I’d love to have it more intuitive and official.