Exciting news this week from Adobe, with the announcement of Creative Suite 5.5. This is of particular interest to those creating content for ePubs, HTML and iPad from InDesign.
Amongst the new features is an Articles pane, which allows text to be ordered for output in single column layouts (such as ePub and HTML pages).
InDesign CS5.5 Article pane
Additionally, multiple instances of a single piece of text can be linked together (a bit like a cross reference) and kept updated. Paragraph and character styles can be mapped to output tags for easy export to ePub and HTML
For multimedia content, there is the new Overlay Creator panel which enables designers to create multimedia interactions for use in iPad and other tablet based publications.
InDesign CS5.5 Overlay Creator pane
Anchored objects have been simplified too and can now be attached via drag and drop instead of using the somewhat unwieldy and confusing anchored objects panel.
Individual pictures can be optimised for output to a variety of standards for ePub via dedicated preferences.
Although these may lack the crowd-pleasing impact of some of CS5′s signature features they will provide significant improvements for those involved in designing for multiple platforms. If that’s not you however, you may find CS 5.5 less compelling.