A retrospective review of Adobe’s
InDesign CS2
by Les Benson
hen I look back at how we published our newsletter back in the early days of BB&C I am impressed with how much DeskTop Publishing (DTP) has matured and how much our newsletter team have benefited from the solid foundations provided by our club pioneers.
We published our first serious DTP edition in March 1987 using Xerox’s Ventura Publisher. ( HTML version.) The theme of the issue was DTP and it contains articles and reviews on the then current DTP programs. That issue, under the editorial leadership of Ed Johnson, provided the framework that those of us who joined our club later built upon.
Print technology has certainly improved. Gone are the days when our editors had to own $1000 300 dpi laser printers to print issues at home, then paste in ads and images on the dining room table, join the single sheets to 11x17" flats and hand deliver them to our printer. Now we just FTP a PDF version.
Software has also improved. BB&C was able to keep up with technology as we upgraded versions and switched from Ventura Publisher to PageMaker and then to InDesign. We first used InDesign in our December 2002 issue. (February 2003 and March 2004 reviews.)
As technology improved, so did our skills. We must have been doing something right, particularly when we kept winning award after award, culminating in the best newsletter in APCUG in 2002.
All our newsletter editors now use at least InDesign CS, and most have upgraded to CS2. This version incompatibility presents a minor problem. While CS2 can open earlier InDesign files, the reverse is not true. However, saving CS2 files in the InDesign Interchange Format, allows them to be opened in earlier versions.
The New InDesign CS2
But enough of living in the past. What makes Adobe’s fourth major version of InDesign such a great DTP program? This review is concentrating on how BB&C uses it rather than trying to be a comprehensive review of its capabilities. At a list price of $700 US, InDesign is not inexpensive. Prospective users, particularly amateurs, as most of us are, should be sure they really need it and that it will do what they want before purchasing it. And, particularly if they are also Photoshop users, purchase of Adobe’s full Creative Suite 2 makes sense.
For more on what is new in InDesign CS2 (and the rest of Creative Suite 2), check out the Adobe CS2 DVD in our club library, Catalogue CD-373, then visit Adobe’s web site. (Creative Pro has a comprehensive review.) Or come to Grant Fuller’s InDesign Special Interest Group on the first Thursday of each month in our clubhouse (non-member visitors are welcome). If you are really serious and are a member, join our newsletter team—and learn through experience. That is what I did.
Adobe Bridge
Keeping track of newsletter data on an editor’s computer can be a daunting task. We tend to reuse some images and text from issue to issue. But where did we put it? And, when we find a series of images, how do we pick the right one? Google and other search engines have shown it is possible to seemingly instantly find things on the web. Why not also on our home computers? Desktop search versions are appearing and the new WinFS file system for Windows Vista may help when it finally ships. As it is, I still use an ancient Windows version of grep when I am really stuck.
There have been a number of attempts to solve the search problem. One is Adobe Bridge, a stand-alone product that ships with InDesign CS2 as well as other CS2 applications. As I become more familiar with it, I have found it particularly useful for selecting images. I use it often. With over sixty images submitted from our Raincoast trip to choose from, most in differing files sizes and formats, Bridge proved extremely useful in selecting the ones that best illustrated our report. It was also a simple task to tag them into a Collection that could be easily found later.
Bridge can be configured in a variety of ways. A filmstrip view is just one of many views. Clicking on the image brings up the default editor for the selected file.
Snippets
Snippets are small XML files saved on the computer rather than in InDesign. Simply select a group of objects from an InDesign file and drag them to the desktop or to Bridge. I tried it with our page 4 (Officer’s Page). I selected all the onjects on the page (images and text) and dragged the selection to Bridge. It produced a 164 KB file that I was able to read in TextPad. Apparently, you can email the snippets to another editor who could use them in the next edition of the newsletter. That’s on my to-do list.
Spelling and Grammar Checking
One hurdle our editors have is working with amateur authors who, while usually quite knowledgeable on technical issues, may have little or no publishing experience. They send us articles in a variety of formats, usually with typewriter style double spaces at the end of each sentence. Even our earliest DTP software had spell-checking and the ability to remove extraneous spaces by search and replace but none of this was dynamic. Also, it was far too easy for an editor to “improve” an article after it had been spell-checked only to add a new “typo”.
I am writing this review in InDesign and find its new dynamic (selectable) spell-checking that highlights incorrectly spelled words fits my way of working. However, while InDesign CS2 does check for duplicated words and uncapitalized first letters in a sentence, it still doesn’t have a full grammar checker to flag extraneous spaces or catch simple grammatical errors. Perhaps next version.
PDF Support
Our newsletter editors appreciate on InDesign’s native support for PDF files; Acrobat is not needed. We use Press quality PDFs to produce files optimized for printing by our printer, Fotoprint. For our web version (and for early drafts circulated to our editors and authors), we use a “Smallest file size” option. Both look essentially the same when viewed on a monitor but the reduction in file size for the web version is dramatic—press quality is typically over 20 MBs but the web version is usually under 1.5 MBs. (This issue came out at 2.5 MBs—ouch!)
Object Styles Palette
Like the Paragraph Styles we are used to, InDesign’s new Object Styles allow objects such as images and text boxes to be given styles with consistent borders, drop-shadows, and, for text boxes, paragraph styles etc. Simple and logical.
Other improvements
- Expanded XML support to allow XML files to be imported directly.
- PageMaker Toolbar. Much as I do like InDesign, I miss some features of PageMaker, particularly its better bullet support. Bullets and other PageMaker features are now available from the new, optional, PageMaker toolbar. Thank you, Adobe.
- Improved hyphenation
Conclusion
I have tried to show how BB&C with support from Adobe (and other vendors) has introduced club members to advanced desktop publishing. InDesign is an excellent product—as is the CS2 upgrade. It is a pleasure to use. If DTP interests you, buy yourself a copy, join the BB&C newsletter team—and have fun while you learn it!
A Win-Win Collaboration
In the late 1990s, we were still using Ventura Publisher, but recognized some of its limitations. We looked at alternatives, particularly Quark Express. We received absolutely no encouragement from Quark, not even a review copy.
Adobe, on the other hand, were most supportive. In 1998, they provided us with a 10-user-licence for PageMaker and three other programs for installation on our clubhouse computers. Each program came with a supplementary CD containing PDF versions of their excellent Classroom in Book. (Students were responsible for obtaining their own copy of the program.)
As a result, we were able to introduce members to the power of DTP and other Adobe products. Many of our students also worked in government or business and their new knowledge helped spread the adoption of Adobe’s products. Later, when InDesign came out, Adobe first provided review copies, and later, when the first InDesign CS version was published, licences for our clubhouse training computers, allowing us to run courses again.
We certainly benefited. But so did Adobe. Our editorial staff all ran their own copies of PageMaker and later InDesign as do the students we have taught. Many moved on to jobs carrying their InDesign knowledge. We could not have afforded to run the courses we did without Adobe’s help—and Adobe helped themselves by the sales they made to our editors and students. Win—Win!
