Adobe’s CS3 release of its electronic layout warrior sparkles, shines, and impresses; it’s gone from page layout tool to Power tool.

Box Shot courtesy Adobe.

The cat is out of the bag.

Layout artists across the electronic layout world have been awaiting the arrival of InDesign CS3, and many are probably still wondering if it was worth the wait.

The short answer: it was.

The long answer: Adobe’s mad scientists have been hard at work in the laboratory over the past year or so, obviously making pacts with the Digital Graphic Gods What Be to take what was already a pretty polished tool and take it up (if you all will excuse the expression) to the next level. What’s resulted is a new graphic approach and powerful new features that will extend any layout artist’s grip on Graphic Design World Domination.

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The new screenscape of InDesign CS3 (click to enlarge)

Well…maybe that’s a little over the top. But we will say that we are impressed. Here follow a few reasons why.

A Prettier Face

The new look of the CS3 applications have turned more than a few heads. There’s good reason.

With the debut of Creative Suite 3, Adobe’s digital design applications have a different look and feel, and work somewhat differently. In the specific case of InDesign CS3, these should go a long way toward addressing the ‘palette clutter reputation’ that InDesign has acquired over the years.

You can never be too rich, or too thin: the new working of the InDesgin CS3 panels mean more working space for laptop and single-monitor users.

Before CS3, we all knew what it was like: a palette, seemingly, for every little thing; whereas QuarkXPress had dialog-box functionality, which made for a cleaner desktop (if it took a few more clicks to get to a certain thing), anything you wanted to do with InD seemed to be housed in some palette or another. This was advantageous, in its way; but if one used a lot of functions and kept a lot of palettes open, the tendency was to have to contend with a workspace where one had trouble seeing the work through the forest of palettes. Adobe dealt with this in constructive ways–palette groups were simple to make and tucked nicely under the edge of the monitor’s visual space when not needed.

The new paradigm dispenses with the word ‘palette’ in favor of ‘panel’, and there is a place for everything: the toolbox stays on the left and the panels on the right. These can be docked on the right, left or on the top and bottom, left floating, added to the ‘panel stack’ on the right side, dropped on a panel group…it’s all very intuitive.

It doesn’t just end there, though. Once docked into panel stacks and/or groups, the panels themselves can be minimized into a descriptive icon and name–reading horizonally, left-to-right. It seems like a cosmetic change, until one actually realizes that they are no longer tilting their head sideway to read the palette tab titles. And it gets even better–panel groups and stacks can be shrunk down to an iconic representation only by dragging the head of the group. Very small descriptive icons that spring open mean maximum space to view work–something single-monitor users will be very thankful for.

Search Me…Quickly

Two decided improvments open up the whole application to the seeker in search of an object or a feature. In the CS2-CS2 interim, Adobe have taken Quick Apply and Find/Replace, put in a lift kit, added an afterburner, and powered the whole thing on a matter/antimatter warp core.

And if that mixed metaphor left your jaw on the floor, trust us…you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

Quick Apply has long been one of this reviewer’s favorite features of CS2. Any layout application seems to offer anywhere from 2 to a dozen different ways to to any one thing, and before CS2 well…we thought clicking in the style sheet list was kind of a productivity speed bump.

Welcome to the new world of InDesign CS3, where any functionality can be quickly accessed though Quick Apply. Still accessible as before, the new Quick Apply palette has a flippy triangle by the input box which, when activated, displays a list of things that can be searched.

InDesign’s new powered-up Quick Apply allows searching and appliction of any menu command, application-wide. Here, we tell Quick Apply where we want it to look for commands and styles.

From the illutration, notice that we’re told than to find a Menu item, we prefix our search with the “m:” key sequence. Here’s what happens when we type “m:file menu:New”:

Opening a new document-without using a menu

We can open a new document without having to click on one menu item–we don’t even have to use the keyboard. We’ve known people who think this way, and they’re going to love this.

Another thing searchers are going to like is the beefed-up Find/Change dialog. Since CS2, they’ve sent it off to college and it came back with a certificate in Computer Science. In addition to the regular Find/Change functionality (which works as good as ever it has), you can now search for and alter object attributes and glyphs, and thanks to what is called “GREP”, find anything in the file by use of regular expressions. It all works, and it works well, and if some of that verbiage goes a bit outré, just understand this: in CS2, you could find things. In CS3, you can find anything.

Effect and Affect

Seasoned Photoshop users know the range of effects one can get with that application. InDesigners now have many Photoshop effects under the InDesign CS3 hood. Now such effects Bevel and Emboss, Drop Shadow, Inner and Outer Glow and others are available from the Effects palette, which now supports attribute level transparency.

A powerful new feature that will probably find wide popularity amongst users will no doubt be the Gradient Feather effect, which allows the designer to implement fading-in-from-the-background effects from within InDesign.

All Photoshop-based effects are nondestructive–they are stored independently of the graphic object, so they can be quickly and easily changed by the designer. InDesign won’t replace Photoshop but has become a powerful new partner–and the designer is saved a step by not necessarily fire up Photoshop to geek an image–more productivity nimbleness.

Become An Environmentalist

As designers and layout artists, we eschew the default; we like what we like, and we all want our favorite things in our favorite places. Failing that, we want enough control over what we use to make it as friendly as possible for us. And just like everything else, Adobe has taken customizing your environment to the next level.

As some of us work, we find that we use some menu commands more than others; depending on our needs and demands, some menu commands we might use not at all. And in the welter of features InDesign offers, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to “bookmark” infrequently-used but occasionally very important menu commands?

Now you can do just that.

The Menu Customization dialog means you’ll see just what you want to see in menus and panels

Tucked at the bottom of the “File” pulldown is the new “Menus…” option. This opens a box which allows, with a single click of an eye-icon and a pulldown-menu choice, to make favorite menu items stand out-or to disappear them entirely. The interface allows for the saving of custom sets, so that what you once did with workspaces you can now do to “menuspaces”–customized menu arrangments for spcialized workflows, swtichable at will. The customization even extends into panels and dialog boxes.

Not to the the child left behind, the Control Panel also is customizable–a flyout menu allows you to go through the offerings and disappear what you don’t want to see. Don’t like the Bridge button? It’s gone!

Many of us fancy ourselves environmentalists–and the new InDesign CS3 interface customizations allow us to bring it down to the desktop.

And The Rest…

Finding cool things to say about InDesign CS3 isn’t hard. There’s a lot to like about the new release, and a lot of uses to put it all to. Brevity being the soul of wit, let’s get witty:

• Multi-place file cursor is a brilliant new leap: the Place cursor isn’t just loaded, you know what’s there, with a browsable preview thumbnail giving you glimpses of the text and graphics images you have ready for placement, including the ability to delete a file from the Place stack if you don’t need it.
• InDesign files can now be placed in InDesign files, opening new avenues for collaboration
• Tables can be styled to the max with savable table and cell styles
• InDesign now exports HTML–and with scripatble XHTML output, content has a new way of being repurposed for the web.
• Text Variables allow for customized content.

The State Of InDesign–The Bottom Line

Since its inception, one way a lot of layout artists and producers have looked at InDesign in terms of its chief competition, QuarkXPress. There has been a great deal of interplay between the two, and through the days of XPress 6.5-7, there seems to have been a great deal of answering fire–Quark introducing features to compete with InDesign, such as the PSD Import XTensions and QuarkVista. On the eve of CS3 release, the two applications were approaching a rough parity.

That has all changed. InDesign has now leaped ahead of QuarkXPress in almost (sadly, no support for JDF in the Suite except for Acrobat) every respect. But more than that, we say InDesign has matured; in a way it’s no longer a Quark-InDesign battle. The new InDesign has improved enough that it really needs little comparison with other layout engines–it is what it is; the closest thing to the definition of the next generation layout platform we can find.

This is an important, needful, and positively droolworthy update.

Availability

InDesign can be bought as a stand-alone application (USD$699) and is also a member of the Creative Suite 3 Design Standard (USD$1199), Design Premium (USD$1799), and Master Collection (USD$2499) editions. It’s available from Adobe at their website ([2] http://www.adobe.com), and upgrade paths are available for owners of previously-registered Adobe software (details available at the Adobe site)