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.