And on some points, you are plain wrong.

[In character styles] color cannot be set to as is, it has to be a color …

To reset a color to ‘do not change’, Ctrl+click the selected color. (Presmbl Cmd+click on a Mac.)

In design started as a great concept. I was there before it was even a product. Instead of creating a high-end publishing tool, we got a re-created page maker.

Adobe then lets FrameMaker languish because nobody there has a clue what do to with. They drop support for the Mac platform (which was the most complete FrameMaker implementation) and then proceed to completely trash what was left of the program. FM 9 is and interface disaster.

In the mean time, here we are 6, 7, 8, 9 years later and InDesign is still a marginal tool for anything other than poster layout.

The book functionality is bolted on. The character level style sheets are broken, because there isn’t an AS IS setting for all parameters (ie color cannot be set to as is, it has to be a color).

Index building on long documents is a joke. Something that should take seconds takes 10, 20, 30 minutes+

FrameMaker can generate an index of hundreds or even thousands of pages in a few minutes. The code base for this was created 20 years ago. Are your current crop of programmers so inept that they can’t duplicate code that has been around for decades.

And don’t even get me started on interactive documents. How about automatically creating hypertext links for generated lists (TOC, Indexes) (Take a clue from the other program you own FrameMaker).

A swiss army knife sure sounds like a great idea. An all in one device that can do everything. Only its just not very good at any of them.

Adobe, the new microsoft. Microsoft Word was a great word processing program, until somebody said.. hey we can do desktop publishing with it. lets add some features, and it has grown into one of the most hated POS products every created.

Perhaps we’ll get a “Close All” command on the File menu …

It has its own hotkey combo (just about all modifiers, plus the ‘W’ key) but there is no straightforward way to modify menus to simply add it …

My experience suggests that the focus group/sync dev process has serious flaws, but I can see why it would be used. If it’s a consolation, Microsoft’s approach (telemeter everything, then design to the lowest common denominator) is far worse, and Apple listens only to consumers, apparently.

Henry Ford once remarked, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have asked for a better horse.” It’s a tricky situation nobody’s really solved yet, and you can’t possibly please everyone.

On the interactive front, ironically, about 3 years ago I took on a project (a kiosk-type touch-screen interactive display, with slide shows and videos) that looked tailor-made for InDesign-to-PDF.

A few days into it I realized that a) the PDF would be enormous and would introduce delays that would not be acceptable, b) the time involved creating it in ID would make the project seriously overdue, and c) CS3’s interactive PDF production was broken (i.e., the program crashed frequently when it tried to export the PDF) and tech support could offer little more than sympathy.

So (having accepted the contract I was now obligated) I learned Flash, which up to that point I’d never used, and ActionScript and wrote the entire thing in Flash. I hit a gnarly bug in Flash Player 9 along the way that forced a last-minute rewrite of some of the code, but the project came in on deadline, roughly one tenth the size of an equivalent PDF, and — even taking the 5 days of intensive study into account — faster to produce. It was 10 times the speed at runtime that a PDF would have been. Even in CS5 this project would not be possible for InDesign alone, although export-to-Flash (CS4) would have allowed some of the layout work to be done in ID.

The point? Not all interactive/multimedia documents are for the web. If I make a presentation to a client, it’s full screen and high res. Yes, I’d love to do them in ID, but so far the production time has been excessive for anything smarter than a slide show, and there’s not much need for more than that in most cases. SWF export looks promising for quick production web banners, though — a nice addition to the arsenal.

In CS4, I tried creating multimedia PDFs: massive files that, even in a 64-bit environment with lots of RAM, ran too slowly to be usable. The last such, a 3-screen 1080p multimedia thing, started out in ID CS4 because I keep hoping. I ended up using Photoshop, Audacity, (yecch) iMovie and (double-yecch) PowerPoint, because Flash would have been too tedious, a 350MB PDF (that couldn’t trim audio to a slide duration) was ridiculous, and PowerPoint 2010 has built-in transitions that were perfect for what I needed. Now I have the CS5 Master Collection I’ve real video tools to play with, so that would be a very different animal today.

So I’d possibly have been in that vocal group pushing for better interactive/multimedia output (and faster interactive creation) from InDesign. That said, experience so far is that the added functionality is just good enough to be tempting, just not-good-enough to be frustrating — what you might call “the Swiss Army knife effect.”

In my not particularly humble opinion, PDF is not the future of e-publishing. It suffices for simple projects like InDesign Mag (I use PDFs that way myself. Like ID Mag the files are enormous.), but the PDF format is becoming dated. It’s too darned big. My jury is still out on the swf animation thing (and very much out on the iPad, the “why bother” device of the decade imo, although I’ll design for it if a client asks).

Unintended consequences of the new content selector include: with a background object selected, it’s impossible to select an object that overlays it even when said object is on a higher layer; dragging an image from Bridge (or MB) into an existing frame fails if the object is dropped in the middle of the existing frame; and with small objects one has to now be very careful NOT to grab the content if one wants to move the frame — all quite annoying misfeatures that vitiate the usefulness of the new functionality. Great idea, though, at base.

Meanwhile, I love the sticky preview checkboxes, the transform improvements, the layers panel, cross-column headlines and the gap tool.

Perhaps we’ll get a “Close All” command on the File menu and “Open All Book Documents” in the book panel (as opposed to a clumsy double-click) next time around. With luck, the ID team will nag the Bridge team to add a “Place” command to the Bridge context menu. And it would be nice to have footnotes/endnotes, TOC and Indexing (Word integration!) really fixed once and for all.

From prerelease website conversations and what made it into the various point products, I feel the weakest link in the development cycle is still suite integration. (There is no feature request category for “Suite Integration.” That omission tells its own tale.)

Workflow speed rules. When I look closely, all the must-buy improvements for me in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver and After Effects are workflow speeder-uppers. All the rest are things I could happily live without, even though I might use them from time to time.

But, I want to comment on the focus groups.

Many of the users who participate in the focus groups are not certain what is expected of them and the group supervisors do not want to influence them that way.

The dynamics of these groups easygoing but the tension is very hidden but it is definitely there and it might make some of the consensus that they make seem odd.

Very good things come out of the meetings.

Especially how features might work in the work space in the world we live. Because you see how the people who direct people work with people who might be in the position to follow direction.

So though the person doing most of the work might know things say the art director does not know it still has to work so that the art director can tell the user what to do.

So what might not seemingly make sense actually can make sense.

So what you see in the new version is often a response to very real conditions.

I agree that some features need to be updated, I also know from experience that rushing to do this might not be the best way of going about it.

You users may not even tell you all that they need with this upgrade as they might not know themselves as would be evident to you in a focus group.

Multi column, balanced columns, page/column/line breaking, horizontal/vertical justification, rules, text flow, TOTAL CONTROL of everything (except some bugs, lol) ah, yes – Corel SCRIPT, amazing!!!!

I can’t understand what are Corel teams waiting???