QuarkXpress has long owned the professional desktop publishing market, but Adobe is now stepping up to the plate. The company's initial release of Adobe InDesign 1.0 won over some graphics designers by fitting in with the way they worked, and now Adobe InDesign 1.5 (US$700 street) is hoping to hit a home run.
InDesign 1.5's familiar Adobe-style interface has adopted more Photoshop- and Illustrator-like features, as well as added refinements to save on system resources and screen real estate. The toolbar can display either as the traditional two vertical columns or as a single horizontal or vertical column. You can customize sets of plug-ins, loading only those that you need, and you can define the display resolution of each placed image.
Though palettes are conveniently dockable and collapsible, they aren't all found in the same pull-down menu, which can be initially confusing. Unfortunately, InDesign 1.5 still doesn't have context-sensitive help.
InDesign 1.5 not only can wrap text around a graphic's bounding box, embedded clipping path, or alpha channel, but it can also detect a graphic's edges and create a clipping path.
If linked text blocks are on different pages, when you use the Insert Special Character command for "continued on page #," that number will automatically update throughout your editing. Text fitted to a path remains fully editable. What's more, the text on the path can be linked to other text in the same manner as any text block.
InDesign 1.5 streamlined production for greater efficiency. It can generate a list of fonts in a document that you can share with associates. Clicking the new eyedropper tool on any object or type picks up its color, fill, stroke, and/or text attributes. Another click applies them to other objects or type.
A long-needed addition is InDesign 1.5's new built-in trapping for PostScript Level 2 or higher, for text, objects drawn in InDesign, and imported bitmaps. And with the ability to save and share printer styles and PDF export styles, InDesign 1.5 offers more control as well as more consistent output.
Adobe plans to keep the core program small and modular, supporting third-party plug-ins. For instance, though InDesign doesn't create tables of contents or indexes, Sonar Bookends plug-in (Macintosh download), from Virginia Systems, gives you that ability.
With enhanced integration with other Adobe products, improved workflow, type handling, precision, and creativity, Adobe InDesign 1.5 is an impressive upgrade that delivers.
Company: Adobe Systems, www.adobe.com.au
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