Product Reviews

With page layout software, a long gap between upgrades isn't necessarily a bad thing. Desktop publishing generally involves complex documents and brutal deadlines, so productivity counts for as much as creativity, and productivity begins with familiarity. Change things too much or too often, and nobody will thank you for it.
The wait for InDesign CS3, however, has given the QuarkXPress the chance not only to get to Intel first but also to leapfrog InDesign's superior features. Here, finally, is Adobe's chance to re-establish its lead.

User interface

Those new palettes - sorry, panels - certainly cut the clutter. Unfortunately, minimising them to a narrow strip of icons means you can only open one at a time, usually impractical for page layout. Expand them, and you run into an unnecessary annoyance. If you need more room temporarily for one panel, for example to see more page thumbnails, you can drag its bottom right corner downwards to enlarge it, but only if there's free space onscreen; if not, you first have to minimise the panels below, one at a time, to make room. Why can't they take notice of what you're doing and minimise themselves?

Those page thumbnails, meanwhile, are a lot more informative, showing (optionally) a miniature facsimile of your layouts. The only catch is that the image quality is Sinclair Spectrum; we hope Adobe is working on this. The page list auto-scrolls as you drag items up or down it, as it should have done from version one.

Other usability tweaks are subtle but welcome. You can now double-click on a graphic frame to select its content, like double-clicking a text frame to edit the text. Styles can be grouped, which is maybe a bit anal but makes sense for things like Body Text Full Out versus Body Text Indent. A new Notes function, with its own menu, lets you add InCopy-compatible inline annotations to comment on items or suggest text edits; we found this far from intuitive, admittedly without documentation.

Quick Apply, previously a box that you could pop up from the Control palette to choose text styles by typing their names, has been vastly expanded, letting you access relevant attributes, commands and scripts at any time. This was broken in our beta, but looks great. The only worry is that there may be too many possibilities, requiring too many keystrokes to narrow down the list. Nonetheless, combined with the ability to edit key shortcuts, this facilitates a mouseless approach that could revive the glory days of high-speed layout.

We'd have liked to see freeform guides, interactive smart guides (as in Illustrator), Snap to Point, and full control over the stacking order of guides and grids, but no such luck. There are a couple more alignment options.

Masters, linking and sharing

InDesign's master page handling was already excellent. Master pages (as well as styles) can now be synchronised between the documents in a Book, and master page items with a text wrap now, cunningly, wrap text. But the Duplicate Spread option still screws up pages containing released master page items, which is vexing.

As revealed by Adobe some time ago, the Place command in CS3 lets you select any number of text files and pictures in one go. The cursor then shows a thumbnail of the first, and you can use the arrow keys to flip through to the one you want before clicking to place it on the page. It would be handy to have the option to preview items side by side, and we wonder why there's still no way (short of scripting) to auto-flow pictures into a series of frames. But this is churlish, because it's now incredibly quick to populate a template, especially with the new ability to preset the Fitting options for a graphic frame, so an imported image can automatically scale to fill it.

InDesign's graphics fitting options, previously just a quick way to scale pics to fill frames, are now a frame attribute, which can often avoid the need to scale and crop pics manually.

You can also place an InDesign file within a document and update it via the Links palette, like any other imported graphic. That means several users can work on different parts of a layout, which will then reflect their changes; and you can maintain a collection of regular elements that will update in all layouts when altered. Rather like Quark's Composition Zones, in fact, but without confusing the bejasus out of everyone. To be fair, while presenting this feature more clearly, Adobe has got slightly less far even than Quark with implementing it. Items within the placed layout can't interact with others on the page or have individual positions in the stacking order. It should be possible to address this issue both for shared content and for master page items.

Text handling

CS3 lacks new typographic capabilities, but there are plenty of text-related enhancements. Nested styles, already a powerful layout aid, can now loop, so if you want all the text in a paragraph (or frame) to alternate between bold all-caps titles

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with a red bullet and light italic descriptions, you can just say so.

New Bullets and Numbering options can be used to set up hierarchical lists in which each paragraph is automatically prefixed with a dingbat or sequential marker (1, 2, 3, then i, ii, iii, then a, b, c, or whatever), in a selected style, with a cumulative indent. This is one of several features, including the existing support for footnotes, that will endear InDesign to that neglected breed, producers of long documents.

In another progression of style nesting, table styles let you format raw text or Excel content with a couple of clicks. We'll need more time to be sure, but after two decades of desktop publishing, it may now be possible to lay out a table without damaging your mental health.

Rather unexpectedly, Find/Change has been lavishly upgraded. Grep syntax is now supported, allowing complex text search criteria and multiple replace operations, which can include inserting anchored graphics. Other search modes cover OpenType glyphs and the full range of object attributes.

Text variables sound slightly more useful than they currently are. The basic idea is that you insert a placeholder in a text frame that will pick up a certain piece of text from the page, updating automatically when content reflows. The obvious application is to create running page headers, like in a dictionary. But there could be many more uses if it hadn't been implemented so restrictively. You can look for text in a certain style, to ensure the first line of body copy is referenced rather than extraneous text or page furniture. But why can't you specify a text frame if you prefer? And why only the first instance on a page, not the first in a column, or a section?

Extras and effects

InDesign's scriptability continues to expand. AppleScript, Microsoft Visual Basic and JavaScript are all supported and can be appended to menu commands to add custom features neatly. An ExtendScript toolkit lets you build custom interface elements in JavaScript, which you can compile to keep users' sticky mitts off it.

Building on CS2's straightforward support for XML-based content creation, you can now use scripts with conditional rules to generate layouts automatically from incoming XML. On the output side, you can reference a CSS file to format exported content as XHTML, whether as an end product or to suck into Dreamweaver. This represents a rather more credible conception of 21st Century cross-media workflows than Quark's persistent fantasies of web pages being laid out by DTP creatives. Markup standards such as XSLT style sheets and the CALS table model are also supported.

And finally... Yes, InDesign has gained a full Object Effects dialog, matching Photoshop's Layer Styles, where you can adorn any item not only with soft drop shadows but also glows, bevels, embosses, and three kinds of feathering that fade off to transparency. There's a Global Light option to keep your shading consistent, and each object's fill, stroke and text content (if any) have their own settings: for example, you can set type with a drop shadow onto a 50% fill, the whole lot applied in Overlay mode. You still can't apply effects to individual text characters (QuarkXPress allows this for transparency but not shadows), or incorporate effects into paragraph or character styles.

CS2's drop shadows, feathering and transparency just whetted our appetite. CS3 gives us the full monty of creative effects, ą la Photoshop Layer Styles.

InDesign benefits from the CS3 user interface overhaul, but even more from some nifty new creative and productivity features that users have been waiting for.

The new Feather effects, which fade objects off to transparency, are rather intriguing. Here's the Directional option doing its stuff.

This is a pleasing upgrade to an already excellent package, and once again leaves QuarkXPress struggling to keep up, albeit with more vigour than in the recent past. If there's a general concern about InDesign's direction, it's perhaps that too many functions are being left to other components of the Creative Suite: Bridge for content browsing, Acrobat Pro for serious preflighting and JDF job ticketing, Photoshop for even the basic image corrections catered for in Quark's Picture Effects, and Illustrator for distortion and warping. Even so, there's enough within InDesign CS3 to keep most of us very happy for another while.

Read reviews of the other applications in Creative Suite 3

• Photoshop CS 3: Smart Filters for non-destructive editing + Movie features

• Illustrator CS 3: Intuitive Eraser + Great colour control

• InDesign CS 3: Richer styles and effects + Easier to place multiple items

• Flash CS 3: Improved Photoshop integration + Better illustration tools

• Dreamweaver & Fireworks CS 3: Web 2.0 tools + Intelligent scaling

• Device Central: Easily check mobile devices' capabilities and test content