Adobe InDesign CS

Photoshop is undoubtedly the biggest attraction, but in many ways InDesign should be the real centerpiece of the CS suite. After all it's InDesign that brings together the bitmaps from Photoshop and the vectors from Illustrator to create the finished publication. However, InDesign doesn't have Photoshop's long pedigree, as it was launched just four years ago, and it only began to make an impression on the DTP market leader, QuarkXPress, two years ago with version 2's exciting leap in design power.

To help it make further inroads, Adobe has completely overhauled the interface. To keep the working environment as clean as possible when you drag a palette off-screen, it collapses to a side tab that reopens when you click on it. You can also save any arrangement of palettes as a named workspace.

Two important new palettes have also been introduced. The Info palette acts like its equivalent in Illustrator and Photoshop to provide useful feedback such as the original and effective resolution of imported and resized bitmaps and the number of words (both placed and overset) in text frames. It is also used with the new Measure tool to show the distance between two points and angle to the page. The Control palette is even more important as it acts as a cross between the Paragraph, Character, Transform, Stroke and Table palettes depending on the current selection.

The extra productivity that the Control palette provides is enormous and it's clear that this has been Adobe's main focus in the new release. The most obvious boost is the general increase in InDesign CS's speed and responsivity with Adobe claiming up to 70% improvements in a whole range of functions ranging from screen redraw to PDF export. Speed is undoubtedly important, but it's only the beginning. The new emphasis on efficiency is evident right from the start of each job, with the new ability to define custom page sizes and to save layout setups that you use regularly as document presets.

Perhaps the biggest advances in productivity are in text handling. Double-clicking in a text frame automatically switches to the text tool while Alt+double-clicking now opens the Text Frame Options dialog. Clicking on the edge of a frame and pausing activates dynamic text preview, which means that the effect of frame resizing on text composition is updated in real-time even when you're dealing with complicated text-wrap. Also, if you hold down the Ctrl-key while dragging on a frame edge, the text itself is sized or distorted accordingly without having to resort to the Free Transform too.

Another major improvement when it comes to text handling is the introduction of a Story Editor. This is a separate window that lets you see and edit your text independent of its formatting and layout. To assist your editing, the Story Editor offers basic word-processing functionality (though there are no background spell-check, autocorrect or thesaurus options), along with control over the size and font in which the text is displayed. What really makes the feature stand out is that the layout version updates as you type so that copyfitting becomes much easier. For advanced workgroup-based production environments, Adobe also offers InCopy. This enables designers and authors to work on editing and designing a publication simultaneously.

Adobe has also improved InDesign's table handling. This was already an area of strength and has been further extended. In particular you can now set up automatic running header and footer rows and InDesign CS now honours these settings in imported Word tables. Another major change when it comes to dealing with Word sounds like a backward-step. Now when you copy text from Word into InDesign, the pasted text is stripped of its formatting by default. In fact this is a much better approach as it's actually far better to format your text using InDesign's own much more powerful paragraph and character styles.