Adobe InDesign CS6 Review
Adobe InDesign CS6 Review
The term “desktop publishing†no longer holds quite the same allure it did when PageMaker started a revolution on the Macintosh. More than 25 years later, print media is at a crossroads, with readers turning to tablets for consuming content once strictly confined to paper. With InDesign CS6, Adobe has finally hit its stride after years of trying to shoehorn digital media features into traditional print software, often with awkward results.
While Adobe InDesign CS6 doesn’t offer the same kind of showy, “gee whiz†features as the latest version of Photoshop, it still manages to impress. Some of its new tricks are so obvious you’ll wonder why they took so long, such as the ability to create PDF form fields, or the incredibly overdue list of recently used fonts, a small but time-saving tweak.
For designers who need to compare different layouts from the same elements, the new split-screen page view is a godsend.
Liquid Layout is InDesign CS6’s marquee feature, allowing designers to easily repurpose content for alternate layouts and save them all within the same file. While its most obvious use is for adapting portrait pages to horizontal view when published on rotation-friendly devices like the iPad, Liquid Layout also comes in handy for artists who need to present alternatives to a client or rework marketing materials to different dimensions.
Although Adobe would have us believe that Liquid Layout grows from magic, designers will have to do a bit of legwork at the front end, specifying how key elements will be pinned to the layout before it gets revised. This new tool can be a bit daunting at first, but the initial effort pays for itself in the long run.
InDesign CS6 also introduces a split view for quickly comparing two page designs, eliminating the need to jump between open tabs when making final tweaks. Perhaps our favorite new feature of InDesign CS6 is the ability to link content, so changes made in one location can be applied to all others, whether in the same document or a completely different one.
At long last, InDesign allows text frames to automatically grow to fit type as it's entered.
The remainder of InDesign CS6’s new features may seem modest at first glance, but they’ve already made a dramatic impact on our own workflow. Text frames can finally be set up to expand in one or more directions as additional text is added, and designers can now choose a key object prior to performing an alignment, forcing other elements to adjust around it. Little changes like this make InDesign even more of a joy to use.
Finally, InDesign CS6 also offers proper grayscale preview and PDF export for controlling how layouts will print on a monochrome laser printer or even a black-and-white device like the Amazon Kindle, while layouts can be exported to the lossless PNG format, with transparency intact.
The bottom line. We’ve used InDesign from the beginning (and PageMaker before it), so it does our hearts good to see Adobe add new superpowers while beefing up its existing abilities. InDesign CS6 is a compelling upgrade that at last manages to unite traditional and digital media layout tools in one impressive package.
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