Review: InDesign CS3
- Article 40 of 89
- MacFormat, May 2007
QuarkXPress or InDesign? Your choice of page layout program just got harder
QuarkXPress is no longer the be all and end all of page layout programs. Adobe’s InDesign is being used by more and more companies, something that has forced Quark to fight back. Version seven of XPress beat InDesign to Universal Binary status, added an improved interface and a few new features that InDesign didn’t have. But now comes InDesign CS3, the fifth version of InDesign, ready to overtake XPress again.
“Speed things up” seems to be Adobe’s big plan for CS3, since most of the new features aren’t extra abilities for InDesign, but new functions to accelerate everyday operations. The first thing to note about InDesign CS3 is that it’s a Universal Binary. No more tedious waiting around on simple operations, MacIntel users: we’ve finally gone native. Of course, as some found with early versions of Quark 7, simply being native doesn’t automatically grant you speediness. In everyday use, we found InDesign CS3 ran quite nicely on an iMac Core Duo, thank you very much, once we’d given it enough memory – even with 1.5GB of RAM, we needed to close down almost all our other applications to get InDesign up to full speed.
Death by palette
The refined interface in CS3 speeds things up as well. Just as Photoshop and Illustrator have had make-overs, so InDesign boasts a more streamlined look. One of the biggest complaints about InDesign CS2 is the program’s “palette pollution” that uses up vital amounts of even the largest monitor’s screen real-estate. CS3 neatly tucks away palettes, with users able to collapse them down to single square icons or compress them almost as much as they like. Similarly, the main tools palette is now available as a two-column or one-column affair to free up just a little more horizontal space for the layout. All great ways to avoid “death by palette”.
The menu structures remains almost identical, however, so worries about having to relearn the interface should be minimised. That is, until you start playing with the new “Edit Menus” option, which allows you to choose what appears in InDesign’s menus and how it looks – you can even colour-code items to be more obvious.
The Pages palette is now far easier to use when navigating your document, although that’s more of a bug-fix thing than a genuine new feature – having proper thumbnails and being able to use your scrollwheel and contextual menus in the palette are things that should always have been there.
The most obviously useful new speed enhancement, though, is the ability to select multiple files in a “Place” dialogue or during a drag-an-drop procedure: InDesign will create small thumbnails of each file in turn so that you can place each of them on your layout in the right place, without having to return to the “Place” dialogue again or move them after InDesign’s dumped them in a big pile on your layout; you can cycle through the files using the arrow keys while you’re still placing them.
Frame-sizing is faster – just double-click a corner to make a box resize to the content it contains or a side-handle to make it fit vertically or horizontally – and you can now apply attributes to placeholder frames in advance of loading content into them. That means you can design a layout, leaving boxes behind with the right dimensions and sizing properties; when you load the graphics into them, they’ll automatically resize to your specs. The previously semi-useless Quick Apply palette has been enhanced as well so that you can now search for and apply styles, scripts, menu commands and other functions as quickly as you can search for music in iTunes.
Long documents get improved support with text variables. Define a text variable, insert it at any points in the document that you want and when you change its value, all the values will change too. You can also include system variables and document variables such as the number of pages in the layout.
For real speed-freaks, the last performance enhancement on the list is the ability to do grep search and replaces. Since this is tantamount to programming, we don’t envisage many people taking up this option, however. We suspect the same will be true of the option to generate layouts automatically from XML and script-driven rules, including scripts created in Flash’s ActionScript. However, this is probably the closest to a new version of FrameMaker that Mac owners will ever see out of Adobe, so we won’t knock it too much.
Stronger and faster
Speed improvements aren’t InDesign’s only new tricks, however. Collaboration without investing in InCopy is now possible. While not as powerful as QuarkXPress’s composition zones, which allow you to specify parts of a document other people can work on, you can now place InDesign documents inside each other: other users can work on those documents and if they make changes, you can re-link them in the same way as you’d re-link to a modified image. To its credit, document embedding is a whole lot simpler than composition zones.
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.