*** From the Archives ***

This article is from May 6, 2010, and is no longer current.

Review: Adobe InDesign CS5

To jump to specific sections in this review, click any of the following links:
1. Multiple Page Sizes; Span, Split, and Balance Columns
2. Simplified Transformations and Selections
3. The Gap Tool; Gridified Frames and Super Step-and-Repeat; Layers Rebuilt
4. Metadata Captions; Mini Bridge
5. Interactive Documents
6. Workflow and Collaboration; (Not Quite) All The Little Things
7. Buying Advice
Simplified Transformations and Selections
Adobe added a number of new features that are all geared toward simplifying how you work on page items, eliminating a lot of tool switching and multiple object selecting.
Content Indicator. Switching between the selection tool to modify a frame, and the direct selection tool to work with the content in that frame, is a common repetitive task. CS5’s new content indicator ring — a semi-transparent “donut” that appears in the center of graphic frames when you hover over them — eliminates that tool switch. Just click and hold on the content indicator and start dragging the image around in the frame. Release, and immediately resume working with the frame. There’s no need to practice “patient user mode,” either. Live previews of objects and images as you move them are now instantaneous.
Live Corner Effects. Rectangular frames also sport another new element: a small yellow square on their upper right edge. Click that, and each corner of the frame becomes a yellow diamond. Drag any diamond inward to round all corners, or shift-drag to round only the selected corner (Figure 4). More precise settings are available from the Control panel and the Corner Options dialog, which now includes separate settings for each corner.

Figure 4. You create simplified corner effects by clicking the yellow square on any rectangular frame (top), then dragging the yellow diamond (second from top) to apply the default rounded corner effect (third from top). Opt/Alt-clicking the yellow diamond cycles through the other corner types (bottom row).
Dynamic Rotation Cursor. Speaking of tool switching, you can forever eliminate trips to the Tools panel to choose the Rotate tool. Hover just beyond any object’s corner with the Selection tool, and the cursor switches to a rotate icon. If you’ve selected multiple objects, they all rotate together without the need to group them.
Modify Multiple Frames. Re-sizing multiple objects simultaneously no longer requires grouping, either. Select the objects to be re-sized, then click and drag a handle on the selection to re-size them all at once. Hold down the Shift key to make that transformation proportional, or click Shift-Cmd/Ctrl to proportionally re-size the objects and their content (text or graphics).
Auto-Fit. The new frame-level Auto-Fit feature enables semi-intelligent scaling based on the position of the image in the frame without the scale tool or modifier keys. Depending on whether the image is cropped within the frame, and which handle of the frame you select to re-size it (top/bottom, left/right or any corner), Auto-fit fixes on the current position of the image within the frame and works to maintain that position as you re-size the frame (Figure 5). Auto-Fit adapts as you extend the frame drastically in one direction or another, switching the points (top and bottom left or top left and right) from which it re-sizes.

Figure 5. Click to open a YouTube video demonstrating how the Auto-Fit feature in InDesign CS5 works.
Simpler selection. Accessing and then moving an object that’s behind one or more overlapping objects has always been a frustrating exercise. A key combination would get you to the object, but the additional click needed to move it instead deselected it and selected an object above it. Not anymore. If an object is selected and your mouse is over it, InDesign CS5 assumes that’s what you want to work with and favors that object over any in front of it.
Double-click Into Groups. One of my absolute favorite improvements is how easily you can now access objects in — and easily navigate back out of — groups. Prior to CS5, the only way to get to a single object in a group without un-grouping everything first was to use the puzzling Select Container or Select Content buttons in the Control panel. Now, just double-click on an object that’s in a group to select it. Once you’re in the group, you can click to select any other single object within it, or double-click to select an object’s content (image or text). The Escape key backs you out the way you came, one step at a time.
Live Distribute. Once objects are on a page, adjusting the spacing between them use to involve drawing a lot of guides, repeatedly selecting and moving individual objects, using the Align panel, and any number of other tedious steps. The new Live Distribute feature in CS5 lets you simultaneously — and evenly — adjust the spacing between multiple objects. Simply select one or more objects that are in a row, click a handle on the left or right side of the selection (or the top and bottom sides for vertical spacing changes), press and hold the space bar, and start dragging away from the selection to increase the space between objects or toward the selection to decrease it. Performing the same action from the bottom right corner of the selection redistributes the objects diagonally and can transform a horizontal row of objects into a vertical row, and vice-versa.
One transformation has, regrettably, been made more difficult in CS5. When rotating the “old-fashioned” way with the rotate tool, you could set the rotation point crosshair with a click before rotating. That no longer works. Instead, you must first find the little crosshair (not always easy to do), then drag it to establish a rotation point. It’s either that, or mouse up to the Control panel and click one of the 9 points on the proxy icon. I hope this changes gets reversed in a mid-cycle update.


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Adobe Digital Media Solutions Consultant, Designer, author, podcast host, speaker, instructor, tech nerd, husband, father.
  • Anonymous says:

    With the advent of CS Adobe did a pretty good job implementing little intuitive features that made the use of CS products more efficient (like double clicking a text box to automatically switch the text tool for editing). However, there is one of these features they still haven’t gotten around to that would make my life much easier, namely clicking and dragging text to move it rathr than having to cut and paste every time you want to move a word or phrase within a block of text. Word and many other programs have had this feature for years and it is second nature to me now. How about it Adobe?

  • Anonymous says:

    This can be done by editing your InDesign preferences, under Type > Drag and Drop Text Editing. Click on Enable in Layout View and Enable in Story Editor.

  • Anonymous says:

    Not only “No Split Columns in Table Cells” BUT there is absolutely no improvement to TABLES in general. It’s as if they forgot. It’s such a heavily used feature but yet nothing. I guess it’ll be another 18 months.

  • Anonymous says:

    Excellent review of the new features of InDesign CS5, so often overshadowed by the advances of Photoshop CS5. I also appreciate the video demonstrations, which are brief but very instructive. Good work. Sharon Chester, Wandering Albatross

  • Anonymous says:

    Thorough and informed review of the high points of the new features in InDesign CS5. Very well done, Mike! And good catch on the SWF-in-PDFs problem.

    I guess the one thing I’d want to argue (mildly) is, when you said “Sadly, there’s no preference or option available that auto-enables Track Changes for all new text frames.” That’s a feature that sounds like it’d be great, until you use it, and then you say What was I thinking … LOL

    If that was actually possible, and you enabled it, then anything you added to one of those new text frames would get the “added text” markup. So it’d be useless, really. The whole thing would be one big markup. Try turning it on manually for an empty frame, then fill it with placed or pasted or placeholder text, and look at that in the Story Editor to see what I mean.

    I loved the videos, they really added a lot to the review. A superb job.

    Anne-Marie
    indesignsecrets.com

  • HawaiiBill says:

    This is by far the best review of any of the CS5 products!

    Thank you Michael Murphy and CreativePro for delivering this enormous work.

    Now I’m going back to finishing it!

    Bill Eger

    ——–
    An old man, a writer who likes people, living in the middle of the Pacific ocean near volcanoes, in tradewinds and soft bird songs.

  • The InDesigner says:

    I hear you about the lack of table enhancements. It’s one of several features I would have liked to have seen receive some attention in this release. Had Adobe not updated any existing features in this release, and only added new ones, I would have come down harder on that. But when I see things like the new Layers panel and a feature like Multiple Page Sizes (which is new, but something we’ve been begging for version after version), I can’t really fault them for not doing everything we might want.

  • Anonymous says:

    Hi!, anyone know how to disable that damn Content Indicator?!
    I keep selecting it! argghh!!!

  • Anonymous says:

    Great review! Congrats on a thorough job. I’ve used inDesign since the very very first version as i swore after a ruined experience with Quark tech support I would never ever go back to Quark. Now while I wish Quark would stay competitive to keep this industry from being a monopoly, I sure think this product just continues to get better and better. I look forward to the install…

    My one question is legacy use: Things like multiple page sizes surely won’t be backwards-compatible to CS4, but are there any other issues? Does the ‘save as Cs4’ option exist?

  • The InDesigner says:

    I think Adobe figured some people might not adjust well to the Content Indicator. To disable it, just go to View > Extras > Hide Content Grabber.

  • The InDesigner says:

    If you export a CS5 file with multiple page sizes to IDML format (the only backward-compatible option) and open it in InDesign CS4, the custom-sized pages are converted to the default page size at which the document was created.

  • Anonymous says:

    >>No more grabbing content, you perv!<< :)

  • Anonymous says:

    If your pages are set up as facing (in spreads), PDF (interactive) will not output as single pages, but in spreads.

  • Anonymous says:

    The mentioning of CS4 coming in the middle of a down economy does nothing for those who bought it and now find that CS5 is out. How often does Adobe expect us to shell out those hundreds of $$ for the upgrades?

  • Anonymous says:

    I agree fully with the previous poster. I only upgraded to CS4 last year—approx. 6 months after its launch—now I’m being asked to shell out again? On top of that there will be the inevitable Plug-in upgrade costs. For all the extras, CS4 & CS5 should really be a single upgrade. I think that these ” major” upgrades, which I’m coming to dread, are way too frequent.

  • Anonymous says:

    Please disable this anoying feature!!!

  • Anonymous says:

    I know this is long after the review in question. . . but there is an apparent issue with legacy files whereby an export to PDF will “fail” for no reason. This might have something to do with the Background Export feature, but there are no real fixes noted in Adobe’s InDesign Support Forum. This is such a devastating bug that I banished ID CS5 from the Dock and went back to CS4.

    I’d love to know if this ever gets solved.

  • Anonymous says:

    This is really WELL DONE! I just found it while looking for the same article on CS5.5 Hope you’ll do a new one soon!

    Question: How do you do the moving landscape background? Your screen shots says loop, but I’m having a hard time getting it to work. What parameters did you use? THANKS SO MUCH!!!

  • Anonymous says:

    dear all .

    i want to receive daily indesign tips ..on my id [email protected] please help me for that..

    thanks

    Ankit chaauhan

  • Guest says:

    I think the tables situation seems to have been fixed. And yes…Adobe is a bit behind a bit on the copy and paste.

  • Guest says:

    I really appreciate this post. I’ve been looking all over for this! Thank God I found it on Bing. You have made my day! Thanks again…

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