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This article is from March 8, 2010, and is no longer current.
When is InDesign CS5 Coming Out? and Other Ponderables
Holy moley, I disappear for a week (off to Lynda.com to shoot some new videos) and I come back to an In Box full of buzz! Specifically, Adobe buzz… I just wandered over to csbuzz.adobe.com where I saw a car full of Adobe evangelists saying “we’d really like to tell you why we’re doing all this, but we can’t.” It’s the perfect buzz-generator!
But, um, it’s called “cs buzz” and so it’s pretty obvious something with the initials “C.S.” is nearing the end of its gestational period any week now.
Then I notice several sites, including this one, talking about how rumors are starting to fly about CS5 shipping in April… that’s next month, folks! We don’t know how true it is, but I have to admit that the prospect of a new version is pretty exciting.
(Note that although I may or may not know something about what is in any purported new version of InDesign, I would not legally be able to tell you anything about anything at this time… however, if CS5 does ship in April, then I can tell you that we’ll have some way fun things to talk about at the May Print and ePublishing Conference in Seattle and perhaps even at the seminars before then!)
What I’ve heard from a number of users around the world is that they skipped CS4 and will likely upgrade later this year, right to CS5. What about you? I asked this question once before, last year… but now that we’re nearing springtime, what do you expect to do about upgrades this year?
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I always tend to upgrade sooner rather than later. But I feel I’ve been a bit burned the last couple of times with issues related to the Suite and Apple’s OS not playing nicely together.
I think part of that has stemmed when both a new Suite and a new OS are released closely together. As a former software tester, getting two products working nicely together while both are still in development is a chore.
So perhaps this time, with the Mac OS stable because it’s been out a while (and I suppose Windows, too) the release of CS5 may be smoother.
If not, I expect another round of back-and-forth blame between Apple and Adobe over whose fault the problem is.
Now, if Adobe would just make it easy to change margins within an already created InDesign file, I’d be really, really happy. (Or is that possible in CS4 and I’m just missing it?)
I’ve been on CS3 since late 2007 and plan to upgrade to CS5 as soon as it comes out.
Mike, to change the margins, just go to Layout > Margins and Columns and edit the fields there. It acts on the selected spread(s) in the Pages panel. So if you want to change every page and new pages, activate and select the master page spread(s) before changing the measures.
AM
@Sean, there’s a ton of people just like you… CS4 is a great release, but it happened to come out at such a poor time in the economy that lots of folks just stuck with their CS3 – which was of course the grand result of the big merger between Adobe and Macromedia…
So Adobe doesn’t release the statistics but anecdotal evidence points to a large number of latent users out there who have been using the same software for almost three years now and ready for a double upgrade… (especially with hardware now being 3-4X as powerful than in 2007, per Moore’s Law)
We still have old PowerMac G5s at work, so CS3 it shall remain. Plus I still have some freelance clients that use it. Its quirks in Snow Leopard are annoying though: for instance, you can’t change your keyboard shortcuts without it crashing every time.
Thanks, AM. That is very, very helpful. And frankly, shame on me for not exploring around and finding that answer sooner.
I had thought that function would be natural under File | Document Setup since it shares some similar setup fields as when you create a New Document. So, not seeing it there, I though it didn’t exist.
Thanks again!
The economy is pretty weak right now. I dont see many people going crazy over those very expensive CS5 upgrade costs. Many did not upgrade to CS4. I am always looking to improve my worldflow so I will see what the benefits are on ID5. Programs like photoshop are not materially improves by the last few upgrades for the majority of users.
I’m always an upgrade-sucker for Adobe’s apps — I have always found that every PS/CS/ID upgrade since time immemorial has been worth it for me. And historically the (US!) upgrade price for the whole CS Design Premium package has always been a few bucks short of $600 — surely, that is a LOT of new goodies for a VERY reasonable price?
I really have no sympathy for those who kvetch about the Adobe upgrade prices. I’m hardly rich (and I don’t even do much commercial work anymore, being kind of semi-retired), but Adobe’s stuff IS professional software, not WalMart kiddie-stuff, and to gripe because it doesn’t cost $19.95 just is not a relevant perspective on professional-level software.
I too eagerly waiting to upgrade directly to CS5 and I’m skipping CS4 upgrade. It’ll be nice if we have some math support in CS5. If anyone knows on new features in CS5, pl. give the details here.
I kind of look at it this way – even if it costs a few hundred dollars, if upgrading my tool(s) saves me hours in productivity on a recurring basis, I figure it’s worth it… I can accomplish and/or bill out that much more.
There was actually a fairly interesting study about that recently. https://bit.ly/aRVtJb
Hello.
@Klaus : i don’t know how much gripe there is about the us price of upgrades, and making 600$ in 2 years should be the least we can hope for a job, but most of the things i heard come from Europe, where it costs almost twice the price for various reasons, and on small businesses, 1200$ (600$ a year) on software look extremely costly, especially if it’s more than the value of your hardware :)
If I can justify the cost, I will upgrade within a month or two. But to be honest, I’m not looking forward to spending around ?1000 in the current economic climate. Too many people shopping around for the cheapest of the cheap, not willing to let you earn the butter on your sandwich (dry bread is good enough apparently, as long as they can have lots of butter themselves).
Besides, I’ve only received CS4 files from home users, whom we all know never paid a single cent for their software.
Part of my business is to make trainings in South of France. What we hear more and more here is : Adobe’s pricing is like XPress’s pricing a few years ago!
(reminder: European prices are almost double the US)
It tooks almost 6 months to really make CS4 trainings after the release? because our clients had not ugrade.
Hum, think about it!
As a designer, I’m using CS4 and really like it but I understand what training’s clients are saying.
I always end up upgrading at the end of the previous cycle. I just moved to CS4 two months ago.
There always seems to be just too many serious software issues patched in the first year to make it worth the frustration, and it gives me plenty of time to play with the demos and see if the learning curve on the new features are worth the cost.
(It helps that nearly everyone I work with is still at CS_2_ – even a handful at CS1 – so there’s not much external pressure.)
all I can say is CS4 has been an amazing tool with alot few glitches (for me) than CS3. With CS3 I reinstalled 4 times from the time it came out to the time we got CS4. I have only reinstalled one time with CS4 and that was because of user (me) error. LOL… switching from I imaging with PS have 64bit on the mac and other programs going to cocoa that going from CS3 to CS5 will be a mind blowing switch and a huge boost in productivity. Smart Guides in InDesign has saved me tons of time… and that is just one feature. Bring on CS5!
The upgrade for us is very inexpensive (education). The other side of that coin is that public education is usually about 2 years behind the economy. We are looking at major cuts, layoffs, etc. for the next 2 years or more. I’m going to have to stick with CS 4. I don’t see that as a big problem because it really doesn’t matter what version you have, it is a great set of tools.
I’m running CS2 on my PC at home. That came out of my own pocket. I still get to play no matter whether I’m at home or at work so life is very good! Especially since I still have a home and a job!
Anne-Marie, I may be doing something wrong but your solution (which I have used) only changes the margins and does not move the frames that existed. I had a complete book where I had my inside and outside margins reversed (I know, asleep at the computer) and although I was able to easily adjust the margins, I had to go page by page through the book and adjust the page frames. I even tried simply adjusting the frames on the Master Pages and reapplying the Masters but that didn’t do the trick.
As to whether I will upgrade from CS4 to CS5, maybe. It depends on what the improvements are. I found it a no-brainer to go from CS2 to CS4, but so far CS4 has proven to fulfill my needs.
@rhadin: That’s where Layout > Layout Adjustment comes in. Check out the layout adjustment and columns/margins movies at lynda.com or real world indesign. It’s definitely a tricky thing, but it can work… as long as those objects are touching a margin or column guide.
We will be upgrading at work and I will also be upgrading at home. We skipped CS4 as CS3 has been sufficient, but we will be upgrading to 64-bit processors (which is also what I have at home now) and would like to see CS5 with all of the 64-bit goodness it is rumored to have.
At work we went from Quark 6 and Photoshop 7 to CS4 Design Premium in late 2008, so there is no incentive to upgrade now. And it was like pulling teeth to get it too! I can’t believe there will be game changing features in CS5 that will make as much productivity improvement as when we switched.
As for my freelance work, nobody, but nobody in the Tampa Bay area has ever demanded CS4 from me out here. I’m at CS2 at home and still get PageMaker 6 and Quark 4 files from clients too! So I still have my G4 Mac for Classic applications.
What I am getting demand for is what Windows only apps can provide. So I am looking at Windows emulators for PPC and Classic emulators for Mac Intel machines as I desperately do need new hardware to replace my five year old G4. And when it is all said and done I may just cave in and get a WinTel box.
I don’t think I know CS4 well enough to upgrade yet! I always wait a little while after a release in case there are a lot of bugs at the beginning. I might wait longer than usual this time though, because it doesn’t seem like all that long ago that I bugged my employer for the CS4 upgrade. And of course we’re trying to conserve money like everyone else…..
I don’t think the argument that you can make back the money as a professional means that their pricing is reasonable. It seems like when there is a huge amount of people that won’t upgrade only because of price (myself included) that you stand to gain a lot more customers by dropping your prices.
I just read today that CEO compensation is way down this year at Adobe. That actually made me happy. They make good software, but their pricing is so outrageous, that I don’t think they deserve as much money.
Hopefully with the CEO feeling poorer (joke, still filthy rich I’m sure) they will feel for us other poor folks, and drop prices.
I upgraded from ID CS2 and Photoshop 6 to the CS 4 Design Premium Edition, which, in retrospect, was a no-brainer. Even though it wasn’t cheap: it cost me 2600 USD (1910 Euro).
Upgrading to CS5 will depend on how well Adobe listened to our (and my) numerous feature requests.Those are the ones that will make me save time and money. I will not have the necessary money just to be able to do a couple of additional cool things in ID CS5.
And I vote that those people whose feature requests made it into the final edition of CS5 get a special discount for the upgrade, as a sign of recognition for a good idea!
Oliver
I can’t justify moving to CS5 until I start getting some use out of CS4. I don’t think 10% of the files I get have been in InDesign CS4, still in CS3. I do see a lot more Illustrator CS4 files now, just not InDesign. I’ve been anxious to start using a lot of the GREP and other new features in InDesign CS4, but until my clients upgrade, I’m stuck where they are. And I’m down to fewer than 5% Quark files from clients, so I’m close to shutting that down completely.
I guess this means I’ll have to take the ACE test for InDesign CS5 soon. Seems like I just took the CS4 test yesterday.
Most of my clients still use CS3, a few use CS4. So I probably won’t upgrade right away.
Clients are still on CS2 and CS3, so I can wait. I also prefer to wait to upgrade until the initial problems are smoothed out. I am glad that I have CS4, even if I have to save back to earlier versions some of the time – am not sure CS5 will offer enough time saving features to warrant the expense. Maybe next year.
Hello everyone! There is a blog offering quite many videos and information on the upcoming CS 5 release. Unfortunately there is (still) no information about InDesign CS 5, but a lot on Flash CS 5 and from the Photoshop Labs (Photoshop CS 5?) is being posted.
I personally think, it’s worth checking it out and watching through some of the many videos, with quite many new features. The blog’s address is very simple: just type cs5.org ;)
Of course, everyone has to choose for himself, if upgrading to CS 5 will be the right decision or not. And there are certainly many other variables, that can interfere in this decision-process like some of these questions, as many of you already have stated above: “what versions do my clients use?”, “is it affordable for me/my company?”, “will it really speed up my workflow significantly?” etc.
To speak for me personally, I’m a graduate student from south-west Germany and as many already have argued: here in Europe, the CS really is much more expensive than in the US! But because I am (still) a student, I actually could have bought the CS 4 for a very cheap price: about 360 Euro for the Design Premium Suite. And for this money, I think, I really get quite a lot back.
But of course, the time will come when I won’T be a student any more …
(So let’s just hope, that until then Adobe will hear our voices to make it more affordable even here in Europe …)
Like most people from Europe already have stated, the Adobe prices are just too much. There is no real compelling reason to upgrade to CS4 in our company, we still use CS3, and it fills our needs. We seldom get CS4 files, and most documents are PDF anyway.
The economy is weak, our clients don’t care what software we use and demand low prices, what need would we have to upgrade? Adobe is, especially in Europe, quickly losing every sympathy they once had.
I purchased the CS4 upgrade in summer 2009, but just installed it in Dec. 2009. Whether I upgrade will depend on new features and if I can get budget approval.
I just hope InDesign CS5 brings back the function to use guides to measure distance and size, by selecting two or more and looking in the hight or width fields in Transform . Why they removed it from CS3 is still a mystery to me, and a main reason why I still do everything in CS2 even tho I have CS3 and CS4.
@almaink — I just checked and CS4 does what you describe. Select two or more guides on the page and both the Transform and Control panels will display the amount of space that spans between the range of guides selected. In fact, the Control panel is even better than the Transform panel because because it is one less panel you have to have open, and, because it provides controls to distribute selected guides and/or enter in a specific amount of space between them.
Likely not. We jumped from CS to CS4 last year, and then added a CMS on top of it, so we’ll probably try to wring as much use out of CS4 as we can. Maybe by the time CS8 rolls around…
I’m a broke college student and I’m still on CS2/CS3. I’ve been saving my money to get the release in April. Although I’ll wait till May so that a majority of bugs will be diagnosed and fixed. I went to PSW lat October and I’m STOKED to see all the new upgrades to PS. The guys from Adobe labs were there and showed us a few new features and we (I) was blown away. Can’t say I’m not jittery about it :P.
I just bought CS4 as I am taking courses in InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. If I had known CS5 was coming out next month, I would have waited. Now I’ll have to shell out more money to upgrade. :((((
[ rant ] Remember that CS5 will come out for the shareholders first and for the creatives eventually. Now that we have finished paying for the Adobe-Macromedia merger, we will be paying the rewrite to Cocoa.
I haven’t seen any innovation in Adobe products for years. Nothing that makes my life easier. Nothing that speaks to the creative human being in me. New versions with shiny features are not innovation, they are marketing. More than 10 years that I have been paying a rent to Adobe’s shareholders.
Nobody needs CS5, 6 or even 7. We need simpler tools to achieve better design, photography that talks to our heart and typography that serves the content. The tools need to disappear and give way to what we make with them.
My 2 cts.
Thanks Michael Ninness for that info. It does work in CS4.
I skipped over the CS4 upgrade, to me it just didn’t seem cost-worthy with the few upgrades it offered, although packaging Fireworks was a nice addition.
Depending upon what CS5 will have to offer, will depend if an upgrade is necessary… if it is worthy, I will wait a couple months before purchasing, installing CS3 was a beast and would not wish that on my worst enemy (well, maybe I would).
Please let the Adobe Gods shine upon us!
I just hope Adobe doesn’t price themselves out of the lead in the design market. The computer learning center I teach at only offers CS3 courses and it was a difficult financial decision to graduate from CS2. We get a lot of CS4 clients who are settling on CS3 classes just to get the basics. We’ll have to get CS5 to stay competitive, but as the common theme is going here, the economy doesn’t foster our desire to shell out the bucks to upgrade. I also teach at the local community college and it may be the first time in almost a decade of work there that we don’t get the latest edition until much later. There has to be enough ROI to justify it.
Seems like the student prices should be the retail prices, and Adobe could take a cue from Microsoft’s Ultimate Steal program for the students, or I’m sure the illegitimate copies will be a standard for the non-academics and home users.
I also hope we aren’t going to be paying for a beta of CS6 or that this isn’t the final release of CS4, just named as CS5.
I will probably upgrade. I heard there’s more long document support which is primarily what I do.
When Indesign CS4 came out I was a bit disappointed because I thought most focus in Adobe CS4 was about flash. There was some good updates in Indesign as well but not enough to make my employer paying for a quite expensive upgrade. Are planning to upgrade to CS5 right away but I´m a bit worried when reading about CS5 because 85% is all about Flash once again, 14% about some new cool stuff in Photoshop. But I haven´t really heard anything about what´s to expect from Indesign CS5. Will there be worth an upgrade if my primary tool at work is Indesign?
I’m skipping CS4 right from CS3 to CS5.
@medic8r: if even 10% of home users has a legal copy of their Adobe software I’d be shocked. I know only 2 people who use their Adobe software legally at home, and neither bought a separate copy (like me, they were able & allowed to install a copy from work at home). Everyone else I know who has Photoshop, Illustrator and/or InDesign at home simply downloaded it, complete with software to bypass activation.
Activation is a useless system that, like every other means of DRM, can and will be broken by those not willing to spend money, and oftentimes becomes a pain for legitimate users when things go bad.
I have to admit that a lot of CS4 documents I get are probably not made by a legal version of the suite, we bought one copy of the CS4 suite, just to convert the documents, and I have to say I love Illustrator CS4, for our work it is the only program worth an upgrade, Indesign has some cool things, but not earth-shattering.
Adobe is really promoting piracy at this moment in the way they ask prices, of course it is reasonable that a professional software suite should cost a lot of money, but why do I have to pay 700 euros for an Upgrade?
If only we could choose the things we want, I don’t want to pay for several Flash functions I never use, while others will not want a lot of publishing tools.
The only CS4 app that I think (in print design) was worth the upgrade price for CS4 suite was Illustrator–it is superb. Acrobat is extremely buggy and crashes constantly; Photoshop is just annoying–crashes a LOT and I find myself trying to remember to only work in CS3 or opening a crashed file back in CS3; InDesign has problems with pdf export –I have had to save back down to CS3 many times to export for commercial print, especially with spot color. I will wait to see if and how 5 is better.
I think that CS3 was a better all-around package and I’m not surprised most people are still using it. Most of my clients request CS3 or even CS2 version files only, makes for problems.
The only reason I upgrade often is that I teach computer graphics at a community college part-time and I need to know the current version.
I would prefer to buy the apps separately again, I am not a fan of the suite.
OH, and I still HATE bridge. When it is on, it seems the other apps crash more.
@lori: I think there may be something wrong with your system. Sure, there are some crashes from time to time, but what you’re describing sounds extreme. Having to downsave to CS3 to export PDF with spot colors?! I’ve never heard of that.
Interesting that our leaders seem to think the economy is on the mend, but people who actually work have a different story to tell…
Too bad our elected representatives (of any persuasion) don’t pay much attention to what’s really going on…
I am very much looking forward to CS5 coming out. I will no doubt upgrade the minute it is available.
From the sound of many here, maybe it’s fair to say that Adobe has not marketed the benefits of CS4 well enough. Anyone who has upgraded from CS2 to 3 to 4 ? and took advantage of the new features ? has grown proportionally. CS5 ? of course, we don’t have the feature list before us ? should be the same.
If you parceled the $600 upgrade fee into 4 $150 increments, multiplied by 2+ years (or 800 days avg) you used the new features in a CS upgrade, the question would be “Was it worth 18 cents a day to you?” Given all the other money we blow, yes.
I will be upgrading on launch date. Having owned and operated a printing company for over 20 years I have graduated from Pagemaker 3 to CS4. If you take the time to learn the new features you and used them for commercial gain you will always make money form an upgrade.
I do want to upgrade, but an upgrade from CS3 to CS4 costs us 890 Euros, that is more than 1200 dollars!
And we need 5 Suites… there is no way I can justify that to my boss… he will say; what can you do with CS4 (or CS5 for that matter) that you cannot do with CS3?
For now CS3 is more than enough… And yes, I am a professional designer working at a professional company and working every day at least 8 hrs per day with the software… ;)
It is really a matter of identifying the new features and looking at how they will increase your workflow.
I would suggest that smart guides are worth the upgrade price by themselves.
Having just employed a new designer from another company we have spent the last 3 months learning from each other things that one or other of us did not know about CS4.
Possibly we all need to go back to basics on some of these upgrades and really relearn how to get the best from the program.
Well, we now have a least a little bit more idea of CS5:
https://cs5launch.adobe.com/
says that we will be getting more details on April 12. Stay tuned!
I’ll upgrade the minute CS5 is available. InDesign CS3 is incompatible with Windows7 64-bit.
My work is primarily designing and producing heavily illustrated textbooks with a side order of simpler trade paperbacks. I usually buy the CS upgrades shortly after they’re available, but I too cautious to switch versions in midstream, so there’s always a delay while I finish books in the version of InDesign they were started in, then begin new projects in the new version. For me, the ability to use variable text in running heads made CS4 worth the price of admission. I think smart guides need work; I’m always turning that feature off and on based on my current situation. Its big problem for me is that it favors alignment to an object over alignment to a guide, so if an element somehow is a fraction of a point out of position, smart guides will insist on aligning to it and ignore the page guides. Arrrgh! Really stoked about Content-Aware fills in Photoshop CS5, though! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI&feature=player_embedded
If CS5 is released in April, will it be covered during the following sessions of the InDesignSecrets Live! 2010 North American Tour?
@Katie: Yes, we will be showing whatever Adobe has made public of CS5. However, the majority of the seminar will focus on CS3 and CS4 — as the goal is to make people more efficient with the tools they have today!