Review: InDesign CS3
- Article 40 of 89
- MacFormat, May 2007
QuarkXPress or InDesign? Your choice of page layout program just got harder
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Effects are now significantly improved, with Photoshop functions such as Bevel and Emboss, Satin, and Outer Glow joining InDesign CS2’s Drop Shadow and Feather effects. Transparency and blending controls are also better, with stroke, fill and text having individual settings, meaning you can keep an object’s border solid while making its content transparent, for example: far fewer games of “how many boxes does it take to make one effect?” then.
Styling also gets a boost. You can now create styles that apply to rows, columns and cells in tables as well as to entire tables, not just their content. You can also develop complicated styles for bulletpoint and numbered lists. These take some thinking about, but when you get used to them, you’ll be glad they’re there.
Lastly, web output has had something of an overhaul. While “Package for GoLive” has died a death in CS3, a new function, Cross-media Export, lets you export content as XHTML. It doesn’t need to be a whole document, just a selection will do, in fact. On the face of it, this is quite handy, but since it doesn’t try to export styles as CSS, it’ll be up to you to create appropriate web style sheets for the content, making it more useful for integrating InDesign content with existing web designs, rather than creating pages from scratch.
InDesign has reached a level of maturity where productivity improvements are the main focus. Indeed, if there was one area where it was lacking, it was in its interface, making XPress the product to use if you needed something done really quickly. The gap’s not closed completely and there are still things like trying to select and move overlapping content that are too difficult compared to breezy old XPress. But CS3 removes yet more items from the list of things that XPress does better than InDesign, making it at least as attractive as XPress to new users at a much lower price tag. The list of new features in InDesign should be compelling enough to convince you to upgrade from CS2 even if you don’t have a MacIntel. It’ll be a whole lot more pleasant to use every day and the interface changes will at least save you from having to buy a second monitor for your palettes as well.
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