Here’s What We Love about InDesign CS6

RodrigoMC says:

Awesome! I was lazy with cs5 and 5.5, but with cs6 i’m gonna study and master all apps i can! #nerdpowerIsBack

Thank you guys!
:)

Bjarni Wark says:

Nice and Im with Scott as this is an upgrade for me and hope that one of the features will be endnotes

Asbjørn says:

Some nice improvements, but where are my endnotes? It is becoming a sad joke that InDesign does footnotes (though they could do with improvement too), but not endnotes. Any recommendations for a plugin to do endnotes?
Adobe is increasingly jumping on the tablet bandwagon, while they’re neglecting features that would actually be useful.
The InDesign team should perhaps take a look at Illustrator CS6. Lots of long-requested improvements and small features that save a big amount of time.

Yrii says:

Data Merge? No news?

OldieUser says:

“You can export a selection, a page range, or a document to PNG.”

WOW!
Finally feature ALAP plugin (InPrint) did nine years ago (2003!). My wish comes true!

Sorry! InPrint could select a portion of an InDesign page to either print or save to disk, but there was no PNG in file formats. There was only: HTML, EPS, Adobe PDF, TIF, INDD (!) and JPEG.

Eileen Violini says:

@ John Goldsmid, thanks for the tip…I have the same issue providing files to clients (and printers as well) and the backwards compatible issue in 5.5 to 5.0 is not ideal. Was hoping the new release that we wouldn’t see that behavior…very disappointing.

dave says:

You mentioned text frames that auto size.

One of things, though it’s tiny, that has bugged me, is the shortcut to make a large frame snap to the size of the text (ctr + alt + C) doesn’t work on a frame that has more than one column.

Maybe this is a little bit anal, but I like to keep my indesign document clean. No text frames that are larger than it’s content, no extra guides, or clutter on my PB…. the list could go on.

In short does the auto sizing text frames work when you have columns applied?

Thanks for the list. I’ve read about photoshop 6 but not indesign yet. I’ve been waiting.

Valdemar Silva says:

I loved the updates, but still waiting for some implementation on paragraph styles. Will be wonderful to style some paragraph that match some specific criteria like GREP for caractere styles.

Let’s wait, maybe CS7.

Stan says:

Looks like someone forget ID was also made for long documents… Such digital times…

ID is not only for tablet contents, flyers, adverts, pdf with interactive forms etc etc.

Gents. There are still many people who make books!
(books are those items with lot of paper sheets)

We don’t need tabs, skin, newer’n’better interface nor content collector when making books… All this fancy stuff is simple strange when some vital things are still not implemented.

PS
Nice User Interface tweaks: INDESIGN HAS STOPPED YELLING AT US ALL BY DEFAULT.

Thanks God! Finally! But why?!
Using all caps by ID programmers is shame for typography/design application… Who introduced it? What will be next? Ribbons?

John Hawkinson says:

LTM: Sounds pretty subtle. If you can post a link to a file demonstrating the problem, someone should be able to tell you if its fixed in CS6. (Maybe this would be easier on the forums? Maybe not.)

Marie Doherty says:

Stan – I (and am sure many, many others) totally agree with your comments. Those of us using InDesign for the production of books and long documentation seem to have been ignored in this upgrade.

sas says:

I remember hand writing material and ink drawing material and submitting it to a printer for assembly and plating. How far we’ve come that we can complain about short comings in a new program that automates so many things ? before we even have the program.

Lindsey Thomas Martin says:

@Jamie: ‘The bug to which you are referring could be triggered 3 different ways. In most scenarios, it has been fixed.’

Certainly glad to to hear this as it has cost me many hours of work.

@John H.: Jamie has been following this with Adobe.

LTM

Mark Smith says:

As one of the long-document creators, the only thing I REALLY care about is whether Adobe has fixed their cross-referencing feature. Although it works pretty well within a single document, cross-references between documents creates such a huge performance hit that it is almost unusable for multi-chapter books.

I know from direct experience that multi-document cross-referencing was broken when introduced in CS4 and remained broken in CS5. I understand from others that it is still broken in CS5.5. Have they bothered to fix it in CS6?

Cip says:

I am curious if an annoying thing which appears when inserting pages in ID CS5 is still present in InDesign CS6. If I insert 10 pages for example in an InDesign document, the program automatically jumps at the last inserted page. Although I insert 10 pages and I need to work on first inserted page, not on the last.

Jamie McKee says:

@Cip

You are in luck! It just so happens I filed a bug on this very thing during the beta, and it has been fixed for CS6.

InDesignTemplates says:

Liquid Layout and Alternate Layouts alone are worth investing into the new version – can’t wait for it to come out. You are very lucky to test-drive beta version.

LGFN says:

@Masoud: As David wrote earlier in the comments (https://goo.gl/4Cy80): “…Adobe is now handling the ME version (right to left scripts) themselves.”

TS says:

After just wasting a couple of hours trying to sort out some endnotes in a report layout I decided to check to see if Quark 9 has better long-document support. It doesn’t seem to offer much that would help me. However, I’ve never even considered going back to Quark before this point; the good will that InDesign had built up, for me, in the early years has completely evaporated at this point.

This isn’t about web/mobile/tablet publishing vs. print, for me. Are the documents that Adobe is so eager for us to publish to tablets never going to involve endnotes, tables with footnotes in them, etc?

And how are these documents going to be published? The standards for EPubs are pretty immature, and the infrastructure for using them more so (try reading an EPub on a desktop, or dealing with different interpretations of a file on different mobile readers). Similarly InDesign’s support for EPubs, which was so highly touted when 5.5 was released, is clunky at best. DPS sounds like a terrible idea for most people (although I don’t quite understand the technology/code underlying it so I could be wrong): spending time designing for a single technological format, of which there’s basically one or two hardware implementations right now. Does it sound suspiciously like a way for Adobe to re-Flash tablets to anyone else?

Are these fledgeling formats really worth the attention given them? In practical, day-to-day terms, I’d say no. In terms of being able to write good advertising copy for CS6, maybe. Although I might just be grumpy after losing so much time dealing with endnotes :)

Fraser Crozier says:

I’ve been thinking about the endnotes issue, and would propose some assumed thinking on Adobe’s part.

Perhaps their crystal ball gazing tells them that the traditional way of consuming books that entail long documents is going to change.

Think about how DPS has already changed design for magazines, then imagine how it will change design, and ultimately the long document requirements for textbooks and scientific papers. Thing about every time you see a reference number in the flow of text, then imagine the reader simply tapping the number (a region assigned during the design process) and the reference pops up over the top of the page – something like a hotspot.

So essentially, we may see the end of endnotes and footnotes before long. I could be completely wrong, but as an avid reader of modern history, I would dearly love to be able to see the reference immediately as an overlay, than have to scoot to the back of the book or the end of chapter to find the reference, which would ultimately be buried amongst hundreds of others.

So I’d put my money on Adobe already knowing that this is how readers will expect to consume their content in the future, and would bet they invest in that vain.

Case in point – the Australian Federal Govt has issued a directive that by the end of 2014, all textbooks must be available on tablet. They have made statements to the effect that students should not be expected to carry around 30-40lbs of books, as opposed to a reasonably light tablet that can carry a huge amount of content.

What does this spell for traditional book printers and sellers….who knows, but I’m willing to bet they are already feeling the pinch, albeit a small one.

OldieUser says:

IMVHO Adobe should split ID into two diff. applications: one for mobile, electronic, tablets, lcd, e-ink etc devices and 2nd for traditional paper/long docs.
Those two “technologies” are so close each other as www and let’s say pdf.
My 2 ¢…

alana says:

superb post.. its very different design..
its new to me and thanks for sharing this useful information with us..

Lindsey Thomas Martin says:

@TS and Fraser

Endnote, footnotes, footnotes to tables, sidenotes, citations, reference and so on are instances of information subsidiary to the main text that needs an unobtrusive reference in the text and ready display?below, to the side, or at the end of the text or as pop-ups. As such, many publications, printed and digital will have them and they are not going away.

Let me give two examples how improvements wanted by those setting print books coincide with those producing digital publications.

[1] Notes to tables: both streams of publication need this.

[2] Many of us want to be able to set endnotes for print. Export to EPUB now places footnotes either together at the end of the document or each right below the paragraph in which it is referenced. If one is setting a book with several chapters, each in a separate file, all footnotes in the book cannot be exported to one location at the end of the publication. Digital publication needs endnotes as much as print.

LTM

Lindsey Thomas Martin says:

@Ann — You wrote: ‘Why oh why won?t Adobe do something about ? most annoying of all, the disappearance of all text from a frame on a page if that page includes footnotes
?’

I think this is what I call the threading bug (and I agree, it’s most annoying). Jamie Mckee wrote above: ‘The bug to which you are referring could be triggered 3 different ways. In most scenarios, it has been fixed.’

LTM

Shmuel says:

David,
Acrobat and Reader have had the ability for a while (since version 8 at least) to specify the on-screen DPI to be used. There’s no reason this feature shouldn’t be “perfect.” If InDesign can’t precisely determine the size of the screen, it ought to allow a simple preference setting, like Acrobat.

Pete says:

Can CS6 export comment enabled PDFs with their default view settings already set to save me the round trip through Acrobat Pro? Or am I missing a trick in CS5 already?

Regards,
Pete

Lindsey Thomas Martin says:

@ Peter, @ John,

I agree that exporting PDFs enabled for commenting directly from InDesign is a feature to be desired. I would also welcome integration of Acrobat’s and Reader’s commenting into ID along the lines of DTP Tools Annotations , so comments could be imported into InDesign. I’d be happy to have them show up in Story Editor rather than layout view. Having this feature would compete with InCopy, I suppose, but in organisations where the authors are analysts of one sort or another first and writers second, the likelihood of their using InCopy is close to nil.

LTM

garricks says:

“Keeps with Spans and Splits: Simply put, the keeps functions for paragraphs (Keep with Next, Keep lines together, etc.) now work on paragraphs that are set to span columns or split.”

Huzzah! This has been driving me nuts. :)

Richard Hanley Jr. says:

Wow.

If only it had Illustrator build it ;)

Paul Taylor says:

The new form editing option was one of the reasons we upgraded. I can’t believe how limited it is – You’d expect to be able to choose the text field font, after all its one of the basic setting in acrobat form editing and a requirement for every designer – be it web, or print. What a half baked solution. They really shouldn’t have bothered.

LGFN says:

Ok, seems I misunderstood David when he said ??Adobe is now handling the ME version (right to left scripts) themselves.? Seems like he didn’t mean that the regular version will have ME support, no, it doesn’t, it’s just that Adobe itself will sell the ME version of ID and not Winsoft. So we still gotta wait for that release.

Lindsey Thomas Martin says:

@LGFN
The descriptions on Adobe’s website are not clear but it sounds to me to as if they have exposed the World-Ready Composer, which was added under the hood in CS4 and supports Indic and RtL languages; and have also taken over selling the ME version of ID, which provides much fuller support for RtL languages. For some years, In-Tools has offered World Tools, a plug-in giving access to World-Ready Composer; Winsoft, who have been selling (and coding, I believe) InDesign ME for many years, have a similar plug-in, ScribeDOOR. My guess is that the regular version of InDesign 6 will offer support for RtL languages that is similar to the plug-ins but that, if you publish mainly in a RtL language, you should buy the ME version, which Adobe now sells directly.

There is information, now more of historical than practical value, in a blog post from 2009 by Thomas Phinney.

LTM

Mike Perry says:

Earlier this week, I heard the project manager for ID CS6 give a demo at Seattle’s ID UG. As a long-document creator, I was quite impressed. Many of the new features may be intended for magazines going digital, but they should work quite well for book taking that same path. The real hitch is no longer that ID can’t create EPUB 3, it’s that Apple and Amazon are still playing their silly proprietary format game.

Those who, like me, want ID to do endnotes, might learn from how PDF forms got included. With the ID project manager present at a ID user conference, someone asked all those who want forms built into ID and all 600-or-so present raised their hands. That was enough to get the project rolling. I strongly suspect it’ll be a big selling point, particularly in business circles.

I’d add these suggestions:

1. Keep with previous paragraph. It’d be very handy for laying out poetry and for any document where there are special tweaks to the last paragraph.

2. Search backward. I don’t know how many times I’ve been going through a document deciding which search term gets replaced and, as a glaze settles over my eyes, not change something that should be changed. But, alas, there’s no way to go backward and, with hundreds of terms, going around again is a pain.

3. Keep entered values in original format. ID converts all entered values into one format (i.e. picas, inches etc.). I don’t care what ID is doing behind the scenes, but I wish values we enter would continue to display in the value they’re entered. When I enter in picas, I don’t want it to become some quirky inches number.

4. Document specific and project specific dictionaries so words used for one project don’t pollute the spell-checking for another. There should be some way to make Hunspell do this.

5. Text import that understands Markdown coding (i.e. *italic*). It’s becoming increasingly common and writing in text editors beats the socks off writing in Word. It’d also be a way to bypass all the hassles of Word import.

6. Adobe’s ID team is near the north end of Seattle’s Lake Union and Amazon’s headquarters are at the south end of that same small lake. It’d be great if the two would work together so that ID has a top quality export to Amazon’s KF8 format. It’d be to the advantage of both.

Lindsey Thomas Martin says:

@ Mike Perry re #5 Markdown

I with you on the usefulness of Markdown and, more so, MultiMarkdown, which I have been exploring as a mark-up language for prepping edited files that can go directly to EPUB and also into ID for typesetting. So, add my vote for text import of Markdown and MultiMarkdown.

In the mean time, MultiMarkdown Composer will export (Multi)Markdown to (X)HTML. For import of HTML into ID, see FramedWeb from Rorohiko.

LTM

Robertw says:

I dont see anything earth shattering in CS6. Frankly was the content conveyor such a big thing? Not in my opinon. What did they do with the links panel? Nothing. How many times do you have broken links on linked images etc. Can they add some additional functionality to help heep those links together or find missing links? apparently not. The liquid layout thing may have some use for certain users. Data merge as mentioned in another post hasnt been improved in many releases. Most of the “improvements” are finding problems where there were none, or just niche things for certain users. Is there ever anything done to make the program run faster? Or anything involving speed? Nope as always on these upgrades.

If you have 5.0 or 5.5 Indesign I see no need to upgrade for the majority of users.

Alan Gilbertson says:

@Anne-Marie: Not only was the talkback session great, but I had a rare treat and the great pleasure of talking with Chris Kitchener and Doug Waterfall (two of the nicest people you ever want to meet) for about 3 hours. The conversation was highly productive on both sides, and my follow-up email to Chris and Doug was well received and appreciated. Chris wrote me this, which speaks volumes about how best to let them know what we need:

“What I love about your email was that you didn’t say, I need X, Y and Z, but instead simply told a story about what is important to you and why! I shall be forwarding this to other members of both the ID and AI team as a great example of what this means to our customers.”

Aaron says:

RE: Pantone + swatch libraries… If your books are the older versions, you can copy over the older swatch libraries; they’re found in the application folder and then Presets/Swatch Libraries.

(For myself, I noticed that process coated SWOP #190-1 is not represented in the + library — at least not under the same name!)

Andy 121 says:

Looks like when exporting a Indesign file to a SWF / HTML file the readers still have no option to zoom in or out whilst in a web browser which is very frustrating.
Does anyone know anyway of getting round this that doesn’t involve weeks of coding or buying some very expensive plugin?

Siddharth says:

I’ve been struggling to align a re-recording dialog for this video I shot at school and a friend suggested I try the new Audition CS6 from Adobe with this new ADR tool – https://tv.adobe.com/watch/cs6-creative-cloud-feature-tour-for-video/how-to-use-auto-speech-alignment-in-audition/?sdid=JUMNF I have to say it’s made my life so much easier. You can get the demo from here – https://www.adobe.com/in/downloads/?sdid=JUMTN and trust me, it’ll save you a lot of time.

Resha says:

Photoshop – Previewing shadows and reflections
3D has been altogether revamped in Photoshop CS6. One of the best enhancements is the program’s ability to preview shadows and reflections before you render the scene, particularly those cast onto the ground plane. You can even drag a shadow to change the angle of a light.
https://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-photoshop-cs6/previewing-shadows-and-reflections/

anna says:

To the person who admonished us to be grateful: I too remember the bad old days.
However, here?s why we feel ripped off:
The publishing industry is so interlinked, that if one person somewhere in the long chain upgrades, everybody else has to upgrade, whether they can afford to or not. The world of commerce (including publishing) is now all about ?outsourcing?, not only offshore, but to previously laid-off staff, who now, as ?freelancers?, have to buy their own computers and software upgrades.
It is extremely galling to fork out for upgrade after upgrade and simply find the same old bugs that sour your life.
When I upgraded to CS4, they actually sent me an email asking if they could shadow my work, to see how I use InDEsign. Of course I agreed and was soooo chuffed, believing that all the stuff that drive me mad would be noticed and resolved. Nope. I?m now on CS6 and up against the same annoying bugs that drive me mad.
That?s why we feel ripped off.

Vishal says:

I used to work for a print magazine doing design and layout and I always hated my writers for making last minute changes. Whether it was due to copy checks or copy fitting, it?s just pissing off to rework the layout, specially if the copy is linked to another page. I?m so glad this new feature in InDesign – https://tv.adobe.com/watch/cs6-creative-cloud-feature-tour-for-design/linked-content-liquid-layout-in-indesign-cs6/?sdid=JYNWX has been created. Every designer will be dancing! I bought online from here – https://shop.adobe.com/ to test out its effectiveness with my blog and I have to admit, even the whole liquid and adaptive layouts stuff is pure gold!

Jamie says:

Hi, I’m wondering if anyone else has noticed the awful “dragging/repositioning of items” functionality that seems to have gotten worse in CS6? Say you have an item selected and you want to drag it to an exact area onscreen, zoomed way in, it used to be that it would dim and you could do that. Now, not only can you not see where you’re dragging it to because there’s no pointer of object feedback, but everything seems to be snapping to an invisible grid. This is with all of the snapping, smart guides etc turned off. HELP.

Debs says:

What I would like to ask:

The last software I purchased was Web preium cs3.3. I have had a daughter since then. I am getting back into web design again now.. Became a Certified Internet Webmaster in 2010.

I have seem a web hosting package that includes dreamweavwer cs5.5 within it. However I have a few wonders? Most of my other software is cs3.3 – Is this going to cause issues?

Is dreamweaver cs5.5 backwards compatible.. ie can I use flash, firworks cs3.3 etc along with dreamweaver cs5.5?

This will be a big decision in which package I will choose. If its going to cause integration issues and coding issues then I shall just forget the package that includes dreamweaver and stay with my webpremium cs3.3 … Backwards software is better than update dreamweaver no others right?

Heath Sikkema says:

Hi David, Steve and Mike.

I have a question about Indesign CS6:

Does anyone know if there a feature than enables the export of an indesign document into a format that is similar to the Amazon Book preview format? I like it how you can read the first chapter of a book and click on the corner of edge of the page to turn it. I want it to work so that people can for example read a free book, a sample chapter without the ability to copy text.

So it needs to be a read only document that can be embedded into a website? I have been able to export an Indesign document to a SWF format (Flash) which looks great, (like a book where you can click on the curled-up corner to turn a page), but it doesn’t display on Mac devices (iphones, iPads etc..)

Thanks in advance

rowell says:

ok great. But have they done anything to improve footnotes? how about endnotes?

i wish you can have severa footnote formats. say one style is numbered and another style is lettered.

also. you have to have a continuous text frame for footnotes to work sequentially. a new text frame means footnotes start at one again.

footnotes to work inside tables as well. you can’t just put footnotes in tables in cs5.

for master pages, it would be nice to have an option to use 2 or more master pages on a page. that way, you have less master page styles. this is besise the ability to base one master page from another master page.

master page can be layered on a page. say if your content in page 1 is layer 1, you can assign layer 2 to the master page on page 1. that way, if you have a full spread image and still wants to show page numbers or elements inside the master page, they can be shown, without having to use effects to the image just to reveal the contents of the master page.

Daniel Soileau says:

Did I miss a reference to a table footnote workaround in all of these comments? Has anyone successfully placed a footnote reference in a table? TIA

Sruthi says:

Hi,
Please someone let me know to design the following needs.
I am designing a flipbook and saved it with swf extension.
1. I need a text box where I should be able to input the desired page number.
2. On entering after the input is given, I must go to the desired page directly.

Sruthi says:

@David: Thank u soo much David.. I ll try that……

Majed Moustafa says:

Talking about the footnotes formatting we use to have in some books layout, we design, more than eight or ten footnotes in one page wich takes a lot of white spaces in the bottom of the page.
So if its possible to allow us to split the footnote raws up to tow or three colomns, preserving the automatic footnotes flowing in the text.
Thax for regarding this message.

Sincerely yours
Majed A. M.
Art directing manager
Dbouk int. for printing & general trading L.T.D.
Lebanon – Beirut
000961 70 743117
00961 70 416922

Joe says:

Hi,
I love the new easy ability to export to PDF form with editable text fields.
Does anyone know how to predefine the formatting for the text that will be entered in that box in the pdf? The only thing I see you can control is the point size.

Thanks in advance,
Joe

Belmondo says:

New to CS6 and struggling with primary text frames. There seems to be an anomaly: if I have a document with two facing master pages, I can only designate ONE PRIMARY FRAME FOR THE WHOLE SPREAD. But if I make a new document with ‘Primary Text Frames’ turned on, I get one for each page! But there seems no way with an existing document of making both master pages have primary frames. Consequently the text flow is only on the recto or verso, and the other blank. Or I have to start again with a new doc and turn on primary frames. Anyone else encountered this? Assume just me being dumb. Thanks.

Belmondo says:

Thanks David. When I do exactly as you describe, I can only assign one or other as a primary frame ? so when I’ve assigned the right one, the left is now back to being a normal frame.

However, I do now seem to be able to make it work, by threading the two frames on the master pages. I tried this previously, but was holding shift when I placed the text, to auto-flow it, which didn’t work: if I shift-clicked on the first frame on page 1, all subsequent r-h pages were threaded, left ones blank. Not sure why. Now I’m placing it without shift, and everything flows beautifully.

musictopia27 says:

Hello All!
I was hoping to see a feature to enable expanding and contracting content. So for example, if I were writing a step-by-step guide to document a process, I can hide the details underneath each step and the user can click the heading to show or hide the content underneath. It’s roumored that Word 2013 has this functionality, but I’d rather use InDesign.

Philbert Murdoch says:

Are the greyscale PDFs actually grey (using only black ink) or are they that 4c black nonsense?