Adobe InDesign CS

Especially as InDesign's formatting capabilities have again been enhanced with the new support for nested styles in which character styles are automatically applied when you use a paragraph style. The nested styling can be based on number of words or characters, which would be ideal for formatting a dropped cap for example. It can also include all text up to a given character - suitable for formatting an inline heading. Two handy new shortcuts available from the Paragraph palette round out InDesign's new text formatting capabilities. The first enables you to force the first line of a paragraph to align to the underlying grid, and the second to automatically balance ragged left-aligned text without having to enter the line breaks yourself.

InDesign CS's text handling is superb so what about its support for graphics? When using this as part of the Creative Suite, the most important formats to import are Illustrator AI, Photoshop PSD and the suite-wide PDF. InDesign's support for these was already excellent with unique features such as its ability to honour imported transparency information. Again the level of integration has been improved with the most welcome feature being the support for spot channels in imported PSD and PDF so that you no longer have to produce duotones and multitones via awkward pre-separated EPS files. You can also now open linked graphics for editing simply by Alt+double-clicking on them.

The integration with Illustrator is even tighter than before, with the ability to copy and paste simple Illustrator artwork directly into InDesign, where it can even be directly edited with the Pen tool. To help you manage pasted artwork and InDesign's own objects, there are new select commands and shortcuts, for example to select the first object above the current selection. You can also quickly align and distribute objects using the Control palette and use the new PathFinder palette to combine them to produce entirely new shapes.

When it comes to formatting your objects and text, InDesign CS offers a number of new features. It's now easier to add multiple colours to the Swatches palette and you can drag these onto your gradients to automatically add colour stops. You can also drag on the Paper swatch to create fades. Taking a leaf out of Quark's book is the new support for mixed inks. If you've set up spot colours in your publication you can use the New Mixed Ink Swatch command to specify a new colour combination based on them. Alternatively, you can have InDesign automatically generate multiple swatches based on different percentage combinations. This is a great way of extending your colour palette when producing two-colour or three-colour rather than four-colour process print and, if you change your spot colours, InDesign CS automatically updates the mixes.

InDesign doesn't just improve its colour handling, it also completely revamps its support for stroke formatting (again an area where Quark previously held a slight lead). Using the new Stroke Style Editor you can create a huge range of dashed, dotted and striped lines. You can even create hashed and wavy lines, apply a tint or colour to the gaps in a stroke and control whether the stroke is centred or positioned on the inside or the outside of the line. Crucially, these stroke styles aren't restricted to formatting drawn objects or frames; you can also use them within tables and even as part of paragraph and character styles.

Output

These days it's recognized that if you're going to the trouble of producing a print publication, you're also likely to want to produce a web version. Quark's solution to this is to graft on basic HTML-based web design functionality directly within QuarkXPress. Adobe's solution is very different and very ingenious. Using the new 'Package for GoLive' command it creates a PDF-based version of the print publication complete with linked files that can be opened directly in GoLive. You can then drag elements off the print publication to interactively create the Web version. Plus of course you have all the power of GoLive's web authoring power at your disposal (see page ). It's a brilliant piece of lateral thinking and highlights just how underpowered and ill-thought through this area of Quark is.