Adobe InDesign CS5.5

Review

The design of a page can say as much as the words on it. Visual design couldn't be more crucial in an age when people read more than they ever have before—on computer screens, smartphones, iPads and tablets, Kindles and e-readers. Adobe InDesign has been the leading page designing software for at least five years in part because it hasn't neglected the digital side of the publishing world. Its most recent release, Adobe InDesign CS5.5 ($699, direct; upgrades from $119), is the first point release for the product in a very long time, but that has more to do with how Adobe is restructuring its release cycles than what's included in the upgrade. InDesign CS5.5 contains a number of improvements that are significant to anyone who exports pages to digital platforms. Other new but more general features aren't wildly exciting, although they may pique your interest if they hit on specific tasks that you routinely perform in InDesign, like using anchored objects or designing pages with dozens of layered elements that get sandwiched in the pile and become difficult to grab.

InDesign has never been a tool for casual users. It's really for pros, which is why the $699 price shouldn't sticker-shock you into a heart attack. But Adobe this year added a new option for licensing InDesign on a monthly subscription basis ($35 to $49 per month), a much more appealing offer if you need it semi-professionally, perhaps as a student or start-up business, but for only a short while. InDesign is also available as part of the Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium package ($1,899) and Master Collection ($2,599). Tried-and-true InDesign users can upgrade from the previous version for $119, or most earlier versions of the software for $199.

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Improvements
No InDesign upgrade would be complete without some improvements to exporting capabilities, but more than ever before, CS5.5's improvements focus on online publishing. These improvements related to exporting files to HTML and the EPUB export workflow, which helps publishers make e-books and adapt content for iPads and other tablets. InDesign CS5 users had access to a set of tools (external to InDesign) used to add interactivity to page layouts and create .folio files that are consumed by the hosted services included in Digital Publishing Suite. In CS5.5, however, these tools (now called Folio Producer tools) are now included as part of the InDesign CS5.5 installer and are no longer separate plug-ins. They're directly accessible as panels within InDesign.

Another improvement made to the exporting capabilities is much more control over how images are exported to EPUB, letting you adjust how much whitespace each image should have, as well as file size, image resolution, and alignment. Support for PNG files was added, too.

Publish date metadata values are now automatically inserted into the exported files, alongside other pertinent data (since CS5 or earlier) attached to the file such as author name and title, keywords, and copyright information (under File > File Info). Adobe also made some improvements so that the resulting EPUB can actually pass validation in some tools, such as the open-source EPUB Checker.

HTML5 fans will be happy to hear that audio and H.264 video files placed in documents for e-publishing will now get tagged appropriately without hand-coding. Adobe also improved how it supports sublists so that second-level bullet and auto-numbered items appear correctly. And tables and footers now export to EPUB and HTML workflows.

Highlighted Features of InDesign CS5.5
With any large and ever-expanding software package, the challenge real users of the product face is how to maximize their own workspace so that it's efficiently designed for their specific uses. Who wants to see tools, options, and windows that they don't use?

After decades of iterating some pretty intense software, Adobe has come up with a few practical solutions. While not always elegantly eye-catching, InDesign, like other Adobe products, lets the user customize her workspace by collapsing, minimizing, hiding, or resizing dozens of windows and panes that hold the tools and functions she needs to get her job done. Even though the customizable layout and structure schemes are not new as of version CS5.5, InDesign would not be what it is today without them. All the new features would be utterly lost, and the program would be a nightmare to navigate. InDesign's UI isn't beauty to behold, but it is pragmatic, sensible, and central to the product's current and future success. Here are some of my favorite new features.

Layers. Adobe has finally brought the concept of Layers to InDesign (as of CS5), and, now that it's here, I can't imagine why it ever wasn't. I certainly have wasted my fair share of time ungrouping objects and sending them to the back one at a time until I could grab the object I needed.

The new Layers feature provides a window listing all the page elements and in which order they fall. You can hide and reveal elements, too, just as you can in Photoshop and other Adobe applications that use Layers. If you have a lot of page elements, you can categorize and color-code the layers. For example, you can group together all text boxes into a category of layers called "Text Boxes" or all of an article's diagrams and tables into a Layer called "Figures." InDesign 5.5 will color-code the categories so that all the items that belong to that category appear in the same color. All text boxes can have a green outline; all ads might be shown with a purple outline, and so on.

Varying page sizes. Speaking of pragmatic, one the new features in InDesign that many designers will appreciate for its practicality is the ability to have pages of varying sizes in one document. You can now create a spine for a perfect bound magazine, an advertising flap, or a book cover that's slightly larger than the interior pages in the same document with other pages of varying sizes. Another advantage of having mixed pages is that businesses can create a single document with all its creative materials, from marketing matter, to business cards, to letterhead.

Auto column balancing. Another genuinely useful new function in CS5.5 is the ability to turn on auto balancing for text columns. When you enact auto balancing, it forces all the columns of the chosen text box to bottom align. If they don't align perfectly due to the line count, the last column will be short (although you'll likely tighten or blow out the kerning on a few lines until it's even). If you design hundreds or thousands of pages per week for text books, academic journals, and other text-heavy publications, this little feature will cut out a lot of adjustments that you formerly performed manually.

Drag-and-drop anchored objects. If your publication uses a lot of in-text symbols or mathematical equations that are treated as objects rather than text, here's a new ability in InDesign CS5.5 that ought to catch your attention. You can now anchor objects in text by simply dragging them into place. The drag-and-drop method makes so much sense, it's a wonder it took so long to find its way into the software.

Highlights from CS5 Release
Seeing as the latest version of Adobe InDesign is a half point release, we wanted to draw attention to some of the most impressive changes that rolled out with CS5, the prior version.

Almost everything about InDesign since CS5 is slicker, faster, and easier than in previous versions, starting with what would have seemed like no-brainers from the get-go: better object placement and manipulation. With Gridify, you can create grids of content while you're dragging a new frame: Just hit the Right Arrow key to add a new column and the Up Arrow key to add a new row, as many times as you need. (If you're using these for text, they'll even be automatically threaded together.) A sister feature, Live Distribute, lets you change the amount of space between objects without changing their size just by holding down the space bar as you drag. The Gap tool gives you fine-grained control over white space, letting you adjust it as you see fit without first having to crop or resize the objects it affects. If you turn on the new Auto Fit option, objects adjacent to that white space will resize smartly and automatically when you enlarge or shrink it.

Working With Captions and Text 
Adding captions to photos is now ridiculously easy, thanks to Live Caption, which lifts information from a photo's metadata. When that metadata changes, the caption does too-so if you copy a caption field to a different picture, the new data will populate automatically. Want your Live Caption on a separate layer? Go ahead and set it up, it will still work.

Photoshop and Illustrator users who may have been frustrated with InDesign's old Layers panel will love the new one-it works much more like the ones in those applications, letting you view both layers and the objects they contain, and manipulate them in all the familiar ways (naming, locking, stacking, dragging and reorganizing, and so on).Headlines spanning multiple columns are pretty common elements, but in previous versions of InDesign, the headline had to be in a separate text frame. No more: You can now give headlines their own paragraphs, apply a span setting, and watch as InDesign reflows the text for you.

InDesign veterans may be all too familiar with the Pepto-Bismol pink shading that appears in documents without all the proper fonts installed. They won't see it quite as often in CS5: If you package a document with the fonts, InDesign will install them while you're working on the document and uninstall them again immediately after, ensuring you always have what you need even if it's not in permanent residence on your machine.

If you're working on a document with other people, now you can track changes within it, without needing to import separate text files and remap styles. The process is almost identical to the one used in Word, complete with easy accepting and rejecting of chances and different colors for each person who touches the document.

One set of changes has the potential to forever alter the relationship between print and the Web. You can now create simple animations and interactivity in InDesign and preview them from within that application (previously, the software required you to export them to SWF files, as before). Flash Professional can also recognize the animations when you export your document in the FLA format. Any typography you've created will be recognized and respected, and can even be edited in Flash. Multistate objects, objects animated with motion presets, and video and audio files (FLV, MP3, and FLV) that you insert into an InDesign document are converted into Flash, so your print creation can have an immediate (and fully faithful) Web analogue. Even your layer structure will be recreated in the Flash timeline.

InDesign: Multithreading, But No 64-Bit Support
Multithreading takes advantage of the power of your computer's multicore processor when it executes compute-intensive tasks, and you don't have to do anything to begin the process. Multithreading kicks in as soon as you start your action (such as exporting a large PDF), letting you work in the foreground while the crunching happens in the background (you can follow its progress with the new Background Tasks panel, which also provides easy ways to see and cancel the processing actions).

Because so much substantial stuff has been rethought in InDesign CS5, there's not a lot of room for complaint. One notable omission, though, is 64-bit support-InDesign still doesn't have it, though most other apps in the Creative Suite are moving in this direction. (The server version has it, but not the client.) So, depending on the size and complexity of the documents you're working on, that might bog you down a little (or at least not speed you up).

Who Should Upgrade? But that's a minor price to pay for the other ground-shaking changes.

With Adobe InDesign CS5, InDesign moved squarely into the 21st century. InDesign is now the integral and integrated part of the Creative Suite it hadn't been before. With CS5, InDesign has made its complete revamping look natural and effortless. This is how you do a new version of any software program-and how you transform a grudgingly must-use desktop publishing program into a must-have joy.

Some page designers might be a little happier and more efficient at their work with these new features for the latest upgrade, Adobe InDesign CS5.5, at their fingertips, but many more don't use anchored objects and varied page sizes on a regular-enough basis to warrant the upgrade. However, the EPUB and HTML improvements are fairly significant for anyone who uses InDesign to create digital content, from online-only editions of magazines to versions for iPad. If your shop keeps current with online media, you need Adobe InDesign CS5.5. Don't wait until 6.

The monthly subscription plan really does provide a more compelling reason for new users to give InDesign a whirl, although fair warning: the learning curve can be steep. Luckily, InDesign fits into Adobe's family very well, so if you've used Photoshop, Illustrator, or other Adobe design software before, learning it will be easier.

Minimum System Requirements

Intel® Pentium® 4 or AMD Athlon® 64 processor
Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 3 or Windows 7
1GB of RAM (2GB recommended)
1.6GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on removable flash storage devices)
1024x768 display (1280x800 recommended) with 16-bit video card
DVD-ROM drive
Adobe® Flash® Player 10 software required to export SWF files
Some features in Adobe Bridge rely on a DirectX 9–capable graphics card with at least 64MB of VRAM
This software will not operate without activation. Broadband Internet connection and registration are required for software activation, validation of subscriptions, and access to online services.* Phone activation is not available.