Adobe Indesign 2.0

Since the release of Indesign 1.0 in 1999 Adobe's professional page layout application has been dubbed the Quark killer. It's hard to say who is most desirous of this outcome - Adobe, which would clearly like to achieve the same domination of the layout market it enjoys in other graphics sectors, or disaffected Quark Xpress users.

Despite the criticisms made of Xpress and the warm reception given to Indesign, particularly after the 1.5 upgrade, the predicted mass migration of Quark users hasn't happened. With the exception of a few high-profile defections, the bulk of the world's printed publications are still produced with Xpress, not Indesign.

This may be due to industrial inertia - publishers and the pre-press industry have made a big investment in Xpress over the past decade - or a perception that Indesign, though superior to Xpress in most areas, isn't good enough to justify switching.

Whatever the reason, if this new version of Indesign doesn't engender widespread defections in the Quark ranks, Adobe will be wondering just what it has to do in order to crack this market.

The big new features in version 2.0 are Transparency and Tables. Like layers, Transparency is a feature of image-editing and vector draw applications that Adobe thinks layout artists can make use of, and when you see what you can now do with text and images in Indesign you won't disagree.

Transparency not only means an end to creating complex overlapping text effects in Photoshop and Illustrator, but it's also goodbye to Postscript clipping paths.

Tables are the bane of a layout artist's life: tedious to produce and edit, neither Xpress nor Pagemaker, both of which have table editors, have cracked the problem of integrating table layout tools that make this simple. Creating tables in Indesign 2.0, whether starting from scratch or importing data from Excel or other applications, is so quick and easy it's almost a pleasure.

Other highlights of this release include long document support, enhanced typographic tools and support for Opentype features, multiple master pages and built-in multilingual support that puts Passport, Quark's multilingual version of Xpress, to shame.

Transparency

If you spend a lot of time creating tables, Indesign 2.0 will be your parole from a life sentence, but for most people Transparency is the star, though it is unremarkable in the sense that it works in exactly the same way as in Photoshop or Illustrator - dragging the slider in the Transparency tab reduces an object's opacity and allows objects behind to show through.

The full range of blend modes is available - determining how overlapping layers interact - with the exception of Dissolve. But here's the best bit: Transparency works with images as well as text and if you place a Photoshop, Illustrator, or an Acrobat 5 pdf file on an Indesign page it maintains transparency. Incredibly, this extends to Photoshop alpha channels, which means you can place a soft-edged image on top of other page elements and it looks perfect.

This means you need no longer bother with clipping paths. Using the image's alpha transparency makes the whole process not only simpler, but a lot more versatile. Now, you can create a mask for complicated cutouts using Photoshop's extract tools, Knockout or another third-party utility, and easily drop the image on top of text, coloured backgrounds, even other pictures.

Photoshop text with layer styles, such as drop shadow and outer glow, likewise proves no problem, though Indesign now has its own drop shadow command. It's not quite as versatile as Photoshop's, but does allow you to specify the colour, opacity, blend mode, offset and blur, though not the direction, of the shadow.

Tables

Once you've created a table in Indesign 2.0 you'll never want to do it any other way. The Table palette provides controls for basic formatting with input boxes for row and column numbers, cell height and width, alignment and inset from the cell border, which can be independently set on all four sides. Text can be rotated to run vertically in either direction or even turned through 180 degrees.

Attributes can be applied to individual cells, rows, columns, or the entire table, depending on the current selection, but the real power resides in the Table palette menu. The lower half of the menu provides commands for adding and deleting columns and rows, merging and splitting cells and forcing rows and columns to equal size.

Two nested menus, Table Options and Cell Options, call up tabbed dialogue boxes with powerful table styling options including alternate row or column fills and strokes.

The Fills tab provides a small number of presets for alternate row and column shadings on a pulldown menu. Colour options, also on a pulldown menu, include all the current swatches which can be applied as a solid or percentage tint. A 'Preserve local formatting' checkbox leaves previously formatted cells untouched and you can live-preview the results before committing yourself. Panels for row strokes and column strokes work in a similar fashion.

Importing Excel files

More often than not, tabular data is provided in the form of an Excel spreadsheet. While Indesign 2.0 can import.xls files, it is much more adept at handling tab delimited data which can be exported from just about any application from Excel to your PDA contacts file.

The Convert Text to Table command then puts the data back into row and column format and all that remains is to format the text, adjust row and column sizes and add row and column fill and stroke styles.

Using this process it's possible to format a lengthy and complicated table to professional publishing standards in a few minutes - a fraction of the time it takes to do the same thing in Xpress.

Typographic elements

Indesign's typographic capabilities have been improved and expanded. The multi-line composing engine - based on the groundbreaking work of Donald Knuth, who invented the Tex typesetting language - now looks ahead a paragraph at a time rather than a set number of lines, and has consequently been renamed 'the paragraph composer'.

The paragraph composer's long-sightedness means bad line breaks and rivers are eliminated from pages, and readability is improved to such a degree that there is no reason to ever turn this feature off, though you can.

A new menu item on the Character palette provides expanded support for Opentype font features. Indesign 1.5 supported ligatures and old-style numerals; version 2.0 adds true fractions, ordinals, discretionary ligatures and other alternates. These options are switched on and alternate glyphs are automatically used depending on the context, but you can also browse and manually insert alternate glyphs using the new Glyph palette.

Indesign 2.0 ships with several Adobe Opentype fonts including Garamond, Caflish Script Pro and Caslon Pro.

Long documents

Pagemaker has long included tools for the production of long documents, and another Adobe product, Framemaker, has built its reputation on such features, so it was only a question of time before Indesign caught up.

Multiple Indesign documents can be grouped into a book, making possible sequential page numbering, consistent application of style sheets and automatic index and table of contents (TOC) generation. These features work in much the same way as in other applications, for example TOCs are compiled on the basis of paragraph styles.

You can also collectively preflight and package, print, or export all the documents in a book list. TOC and index entries automatically convert to hyperlinks when exporting to pdf and HTML, as do manually inserted links.

Indesign's support for XML import and export and tagged pdf export make it an obvious candidate for production environments, with multiple output destinations that include print, the web and handhelds.

Better by design

Indesign is generally much quicker, particularly when opening and saving, the printing interface has been overhauled and you're no longer restricted to Postscript output devices - you don't even need to use the AdobePS driver. A new preview mode hides all the non-printing items and dims anything outside the trim marks, so you can accurately see how bleed items are positioned and you can even edit in this view. Overprint preview provides a check on overprinting spot and CMYK colour effects.

Existing Indesign users should upgrade immediately and those still waiting for Xpress 5.0 should take a long look at the features, workflow implications and comparative costs of the products before making a decision. If ever there was an argument for jumping the Xpress ship, Indesign 2.0 is it.

Price
£528.75 (£450 ex VAT), Upgrade £99 ex VAT

Contact
Adobe: 020 8606 4001 www.adobe.co.uk