InDesign 1.5- All in Favor

by Tatyana Sinioukov

However slowly, book manufacturers are getting ready to embrace Adobe InDesign 1.5, a wisely priced and vastly improved upgrade to 1.0

Adobe InDesign 1.5, the recently released upgrade to Adobe's professional page layout and design program InDesign 1.0, offers several features that enhance its PDF workflow and integration with other Adobe products.

Like its previous version, InDesign 1.5 can be integrated with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator files; InDesign 1.5 also opens QuarkXPress and Adobe PageMaker files directly. A reported over 70 new or improved features include design tools (some are standard in other Adobe products) like the eyedropper, free transform and smooth paths, and docking palettes. In 1.5, it is now possible to wrap text around any imported EPS, PDF or image file; undo multiple steps; customize keyboard shortcuts, use the toolbox layout, and even define which plug-ins are running.

It gets better

"There are things that we've done to enhance our support, for instance, of native Photoshop files and native Illustrator files," says David Evans, Adobe's senior InDesign evangelist. Publishers of graphics-heavy books, he continues, would appreciate the support for the new clipping paths and alpha channels in Photoshop files. These new features provide users with the ability to align text to any path and then apply special effects and create clipping paths from the alpha channels.

One of the new typography features that is guaranteed to make book publishers happy, Evans remarks, is the multiline composer. It analyzes the flow of text on the page and causes the line to break much more efficiently and smoothly.

To simplify PDF export, Adobe, says Evans, added in 1.5 the ability to both script PDF output and to define PDF style. "What this means," he explains, "is that if a book publisher had created a certain PDF style that ... they wanted to share with all of their customers, they can define that style and ... give it to their image end-users."