Tons of Other Stuff
Brief mentions of the following features don’t mean they’re insignificant or unimportant, only that you’d probably run out of the room screaming if this review went on for more pages.
Among the many interface changes is a Smart Cursor that displays a pop-up guide to the dimensions, rotation, and XY coordinates of any item it’s placed over; a truly useful system of Smart Guides and Smart Align that figures out where you want to place something in sequence; tabbed windows; and a Rotate Spread view that temporarily changes the display to 90- or 180-degree angles.
InDesign CS4 also adds direct support for Adobe Kuler, the online color-palette management tool; a “share-my-screen” function; the ability to refine the way strokes are created; a new Contact-sheet Placement tool that allows you to easily place multiple images in a grid form; some scaling shortcuts; and Power Zoom.
It’s always hard to predict which new features will be most welcome, since we all work differently. One person’s Power Zoom is another person’s Multiple GREP Expressions. If I haven’t covered something important to you, please post a comment.
One More Thing…
I will burn up a few more words on a feature that’s one of the most important publishing developments in years, though it won’t immediately mean anything to the average user.
With Creative Suite 4, Adobe released a new XML file format, specifically for InDesign documents, called IDML. This developer specification expands on XML to the degree that it’s now possible for third-party companies to read and write InDesign files in XML, down to the absolute finest detail.
This means that developers could, for instance, create fully formatted InDesign documents on the fly using databases of information and non-Adobe applications. They could automatically replace elements in an InDesign file without having to open the file in native format, pull out and re-combine elements from existing InDesign documents, build systems for using the Internet as a front-end to complex InDesign publishing systems, and create a whole new generation of cross-media workflows.
Hats off to Adobe for opening up the InDesign format in this way.
Recommendations
Times are tough and money is tight. The days of no-questions-asked upgrades are over for a while, whether you’re a company or an individual.
If you work on the sort of documents where these new features will pay off quickly in increased productivity, the move to InDesign CS4 is a wise investment. Mac users who are plagued with problems running CS3 on Leopard should also seriously consider CS4, which is 10.5-compatible.
Finally, if you didn’t upgrade to CS3, or if you’re in the market for a new, more powerful computer, it makes sense to buy CS4 now. Adobe has done a good job with the entire Creative Suite. (Read reviews of the other apps here.) And the more Adobe CS products you use, the more benefit you’ll get from the upgrade.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on October 30, 2008
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
