In parallel to the recent launch of Creative Suite 6 and Creative Cloud Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite tools also received a significant update this month. This article from Creative Pro gives a good overview but here are some of the important highlights.
Creative Cloud is Adobe’s online service which will bring together many of the leading design and production applications together with a collaborative workspace and online storage facility.
Creative Cloud is a subscription service, membership of which allows access to all of the forthcoming Creative Suite 6 applications plus Adobe Muse (for building web sites without coding), Adobe’s Touch apps (such as Photoshop, Adobe Ideas etc for mobile devices) and 20gb of free storage.
Members will be able to manage and download their software applications from Creative Cloud. Note that this does not mean the apps are streamed over the cloud, InDesign, Photoshop etc are still downloaded and installed on your desktop.
Today Adobe has released an update (7.5.3) for InDesign and InCopy, addressing numerous issues.
John Hawkinson has posted an extensive list here, but notable fixes include:
Stability enhancements due to fixes to apparently random crashes when copying & pasting, exporting to PDF with text variables, file recovery, packaging & preflighting and with certain fonts in balanced text frames.
Performance improvements when moving objects when display is set to High Quality and general redraw performance improvements.
Improved graphics handling including white stitching line in JPEG export with certain placed images scaling percentage and JPEG export resolution and reduced transparency support for TIFF files from Photoshop CS6.
Last week at Adobe Max, there were a number of exciting announcements, several of which concerned Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite.
If you’re not familiar with the term, DPS is the suite of tools and services Adobe has been developing to allow publishing from InDesign to iPad and Android tablets.
InDesign has some extremely powerful text editing tools however it’s more likely that you will be creating and importing text from Microsoft Word. One of InDesign’s less well-known features is the Word Import Filter, designed to help you work more efficiently in a Word based workflow.
The filter is only accessible when you import a text file. In the Import dialogue box, make sure to check the Show Import Options check box.
InDesign text import dialogue box
InDesign will display the following dialogue box.
InDesign Word import options dialogue box
Have you ever noticed how many useful InDesign functions can be enabled by using the option/alt key?
I’ve tried to itemise as many as possible in the following list though there may be some more…
General uses for the option/alt key
In most Adobe applications, holding option/alt changes the cancel button to reset in many dialogue boxes, saving the need to close and reopen the box.
Similarly, option/alt + drag an object duplicates it, including guides
Option/alt In InDesign
holding option/alt on import text, changes the loaded text cursor to semi-auto flow mode. This will flow text into a column then reload the cursor automatically.
In the final part of this series, I’ll describe how to import movie content into InDesign and how to export your document as an animated Flash file.
InDesign has been able to import movies for some time, unfortunately it was not possible to view them without exporting the file to another format. CS5 introduced the Media pane which addresses this issue.
Empty media frame
Importing movies is exactly the same as importing standard images. Either select an existing frame or import directly by hitting cmd + d (ctrl + on Windows).
Media import into InDesign CS5
Multi-state objects
The multi-state object is a new concept to most working in design for print. It’s an animated format that allows an object to change appearance when clicked. In this case we’ll create a slideshow which behaves a bit like a shuffling a deck of cards.
Pictures to be converted into a multi-state object
With this part of the series we move to InDesign’s new interactive features, specifically creating animations.
Before starting an interactive document, it’s worth changing your workspace to Interactive. There are a number of new panels on display including Animation, Timing, Preview, Media and Object States. We’ll use each of these in the next couple of articles.
InDesign interactive workspace panels
When you open a document with animated objects you will notice a new icon. InDesign cannot display animation directly so it indicates where an animation has been applied by displaying the 3 bubbles icon. This spread already has three.
