Top 10 New InDesign CS2 Features

The Top 10 New InDesign CS Features from Quark VS InDesign.com

We’ve been biting our tongues for months–in my case, for more than two years–about all the incredible features in InDesign CS2. Now that Adobe has officially announced it, we can finally speak.

Here are the Top 10 New InDesign CS2 Features we think you want to know about:

Drag And Drop Text This is one of those love it or hate it features that Quark has had but InDesign hasn’t–until now. Drag and drop text within and between text frames in your layout, within or between instances of the Story Editor window, between multiple views of a document, and between documents.

Object styles Just like Paragraph and Character styles, InDesign CS2 features a new palette (Yes! Another palette!) where graphic, text, and frame styling may be saved, applied, and shared–across one or many documents or between designers. Just got your stroke, fill, feathering, and drop shadow exactly the way you like it on the first of 300 picture frames? Make a style, select all, and apply. Done.

Anchored Objects Anchor callouts, pull quotes, sidebars, margin notes, and graphics to specific places in a story. If the text reflows, so do the anchored items–automatically.

Transform Again Actually, this is a set of four related commands: Transform Again, Transform Again Individually, Transform Sequence Again, and Transform Sequence Again Individually. Modify one object once–scale it, rotate it, skew it–then click on another object (or group) and let Transform Again repeat your transformations in an almost eery replay. As you may surmise, Transform Again Individually does the same thing for multiple objects concurrently, but transforms them independent of one another. The two Transform Sequence commands apply scale, rotate, or skew in sequence rather than all at once.

Multi-Page PDF Import You pre-pressmen are going to love this: Still got clients who haven’t migrated from QuarkXPress? Have them print and Distill a PDF for you, then place a single page, every page, or a range of pages from the multi-page PDF into InDesign CS2. Proof, preflight, RIP. No more hassling with page-at-a-time placement!

Bullets & Numbering Ok, so it’s not totally new; the InDesign CS PageMaker Plug-In Pack (and integrated InDesign CS PageMaker Edition) brought PageMaker’s bullets and numbering feature into the butterfly. Still, this is a killer feature. Now it’s in there by default; no extra plug-in to buy and install on your work stations. In fact, all of the PageMaker Plug-In Pack features are included standard with InDesign CS2–data merge, the Position tool, PageMaker toolbar, even imposition through InBooklet Special Edition. (Yeah, you caught us. This was our sneaky way of slipping more than ten items into this Top 10. We’ll do it again, just watch.)

WYSIWYG Font Menus Now the Font menus show fonts in their typefaces–and the Font Preview Size is customizable! The menu even shows font icons for OpenType, TrueType, or PostScript fonts for instant identification.

Saving One Version Back No, really. This time it works. Exporting from InDesign CS2 into the InDesign Interchange (INX) format allows InDesign CS to open the files. Support for INX files is already available in InDesign CS.

Text Wrap for Inline Objects Finally! You can now specify a text wrap on inline images and other objects without iffy hacks.

PSD Layers Support Eliminating one key disadvantage InDesign suffered QuarkXPress 6.5, InDesign CS2 now enables selective activation of layers embedded in Photoshop PSD files. And, it goes not one but two better. InDesign CS2 also supports Photoshop Layer Comps embedded in PSD files. And, InDesign CS2 handles layered PDFs just as well as layered Photoshop documents.

There you are, the Quark VS InDesign.com picks for the Top 10 new InDesign CS2 features. This is by no means an exhaustive list–though it was exhausting paring the list down to just ten! There is so much new and improved in InDesign CS2 that we just can’t tell you about all of it in only one day. What an amazing tool is InDesign CS!

Honorable Mentions

(See, told you we’d sneak in more features):

Paste Without Formatting Copying and pasting text from Word or from one place in an InDesign story to another has always entailed styling it after pasting. With the new Paste Without Formatting Edit menu item, pasted text forgets its original formatting and style in favor of picking up the formatting of the text into which it’s being inserted.

InDesign Snippets Libraries have been around for years, pioneered by PageMaker. In typical InDesign fashion, CS2 one-ups libraries with the ability to export objects as standalone, reusable, shareable files. Snippets may be placed or dragged into a layout, and InDesign will re-create the original object(s), its formatting, and even its relative positioning on the page.

Spelling & Dictionary Enhancements This is another instance where we’re going to cram multiple features under a single umbrella. Dynamic Spelling flags mispellings as you type, and you can even have InDesign CS2 automatically correct words for you–which can be a powerful shorthand system for the quick-minded. Working with user dictionaries in InDesign has never been, well, convenient. That’s a thing of the past. Adding words to the user dictionary is now just one-click (really), and, best of all, user dictionaries can be imported and exported as lists!

QuarkXPress Passport Import InDesign CS2 still imports QuarkXPress version 3.3-4.1x files, but now it also imports multi-language QuarkXPress Passport 3.3 and 4.1x documents and templates. Good news for those who need to work in a true multi-language application without breaking the bank.

Improved XML Flexibility Import and export XML with more control, including linking to XML content for easier updating. Apply XML tags to tables, and then import XML content into and export it from those tables. And, automatically apply the formatting from tagged text place-holders to repeating elements in imported XML files.