Top Ten New Features in
InDesign CS4
In This Chapter
ᮣ Taking a look at finishing touches
ᮣ Getting the scoop on fancy features
Admit it — you came here before looking at the rest of the book. I can’t blame you — everyone loves to know what’s new. Well, InDesign CS4
has some really cool new stuff. Much of it falls into the category of nice little touches that make something that much easier to use.
But InDesign also added a bunch of “Hey, let’s see what the users can do with this” kind of new thing just to keep everyone’s brain sharp. You’ll have your favorite new features, of course, but because I’m writing the book, I get to tell you mine!
Smart Guides, Spacing, and Dimensions
Smart guides, spacing, and dimensions — three related features — are handsdown the best addition to InDesign in this version. As Chapter 10 explains, these features give you visual feedback as you work with objects — create, resize, move, and rotate them — so that they snap to the locations, sizes, rotations, and so on of nearby objects. The theory is that most objects are related to the nearby ones, so it makes sense for, say, a new frame’s left side to align to the frame nearest it if your mouse gets close to that existing frame’s horizontal coordinate.
InDesign has always allowed precise positioning with the Transform panel and later the Control panel — which you still have — but the truth is that most layout artists are mouse-based, and those controls had no effect on mouse-driven design work. Now InDesign has solved that issue.
388 Part VIII: The Part of Tens
Cross-References
Programs from more than a decade ago — including Adobe’s own
FrameMaker technical publishing tool — let you add cross-references in your documents to text on other pages, so the page numbers and even headlines references were updated automatically in all the places referring to them. Now InDesign finally lets you do the same thing, using new controls in the Hyperlinks panel to provide cross-referencing capabilities. Chapter 24
explains how this tool works.
Flash Export
Sure, Adobe has a vested interest in promoting its Flash Professional animation tool for the Web, but the truth is that lines separating print, the Web, and computer-based documents are blurring away. It makes sense for a layout tool to support all three types of presentation approaches, so the ability to export InDesign files to Flash format is very welcome. The Flash export capability gives you a new venue to use existing InDesign capabilities, including hyperlinks, rollovers, embedded audio, embedded video, and the new page transitions. Chapter 24 explains the new Flash export feature.
Nested Lines
I’ve been whining for this feature ever since Adobe introduced the nested styles feature in the CS version. (See — they do listen!) Nested styles are a great way to apply formatting based on regular patterns, such as making the first sentence always bold or the text through an em space use a specific character style (such as for lists).
But many designers like to make the first line or two of a paragraph — typically at the beginning of a story or section — all small caps or have a character style applied. Nested styles can’t do that, as they didn’t know how to count lines. As Chapter 13 explains, InDesign now knows how to count lines so that you can apply a desired style to however many lines in arrow that you want.
Chapter 25: Top Ten New Features in InDesign CS4
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Dynamic Autoflow
Although InDesign already had an option to add pages as needed to your layout as you placed text files, the CS4 version makes the process easier and gives you more control over such autoflow, as Chapter 11 explains. Pointer Information
This feature is one of those subtle improvements that you wonder how no one thought of it before. You can now have InDesign display near your mouse pointer the current coordinates, so when you’re drawing, rotating, or resizing something, you can see exactly where the mouse is, what size the object is, and what the new rotation is.
You’re focused on that mouse pointer while you’re working, so it makes perfect sense to display that key information — what InDesign calls transformation values — where your attention is. Chapter 8 shows what I mean. Spread Rotation
Spread rotation also falls in the “Why didn’t they think of it before?” department. When you use rotated text, it’s hard to edit! After all, you can’t turn your head at those angles (at least I can’t!). So now InDesign lets you rotate specific spreads so that you can work with the text straight on. Of course, these rotated spreads are just for viewing; they print the normal way, as Chapter 8 explains.
Conditional Text
Some people work on documents, such as catalogs and price sheets, that have multiple versions with regional or other minor differences, requiring several versions of the document with just slight differences. Imagine a price sheet that has prices in euros, U.S. dollars, yen, Canadian dollars, and British pounds — except for the prices, everything’s the same, yet you need to make them into separate documents and then update any description changes across them all. That’s a management fiasco waiting to happen. InDesign CS4’s conditional text feature solves that, letting you have one document with all the variants in it. You then have the ability to toggle among each of the variants. Chapter 21 explains how to use this new feature. 390 Part VIII: The Part of Tens
Automatic Preflighting
Preflighting is something we all should do, but often don’t: Review the layout for the little gotchas that can ruin the printed version. One example is not noticing that a photo is RGB so that when it prints in CMYK on a high-end printer, its colors are off. Another example is a low-res preview file that you forgot to replace before printing with the high-res version. Or a TrueType font that you used by accident on an imagesetter that supports only PostScript fonts. You get the idea.
Now, InDesign is always checking your document as you work on it, displaying the number of current errors at the bottom of the document window. (Boy, is that scary to watch!) This double-check means that you can see that you have issues early enough to fix them, before a crisis ensues. Even better, InDesign lets you create your own preflight profiles so that you can define exactly what issues to be on the hunt for. Chapter 23 explains how preflighting works.
PDF Page Rotations
Okay, this feature is an eye-candy pick; most documents will never use it. But if you’re creating PDF or Flash files from your InDesign document, you can now set page transitions — those animated wipes, fades, and corner peels common to PowerPoint presentations — so as someone moves from one page to another in a PDF or Flash file, they get those same transition effects. Dorky but cool. Chapter 24 explains how to apply them.