InDesign CS3

Adobe cracked the page layout market with InDesign CS and CS2, and with InDesign CS3, it’s on a roll. And Adobe isn’t a company that looks likely to run out of ideas: InDesign CS3 turns out to be a damn good upgrade that packs in a bunch of genuinely usable – and highly desirable – new page design and text editing features.

The Transparency palette and the Drop Shadow and Feather dialog windows have been ripped out and replaced by a single, more powerful Effects panel. You can apply and customise a range of Photoshop-like effects, including inner and outer shadows and glows, object bevels and three kinds of feather vignetting. An Opacity slider plus Adobe’s full set of Transparency Blending Modes are still there, but now they can be set to work on an object’s fill and stroke independently. And yes, you can make a text frame’s fill and stroke transparent while keeping its text opaque.

Placing text and pictures into a layout is easier because you can load multiple files (in any combination) to the Place cursor and then add them one by one to the page. The loaded Place cursor shows a thumbnail preview of each image or the opening words of each text file in turn, and you can tap the up and down arrow keys to shuffle through the file thumbnails before each click. As a time-saving feature for busy layout artists, this is just fantastic.

It’s now possible to save and re-use design styles for entire tables, and even individual cells, without resorting to a third-party plug-in. Although InDesign tables are still a bit fiddly, the introduction of table styles in InDesign CS3 at least means that repeated table formatting has been transformed to a single click.

In what looks like a sideswipe at QuarkXPress 7’s Composition Zones feature, InDesign CS3 lets you place layouts inside other layouts, as if they were picture files. You could create a page made up of separate mini-layouts and make these available to colleagues to work on; as they make their edits, your composite page would be updated automatically. It’s a simple idea that we need more time to test.

Importantly, text editors have not been ignored in this upgrade. The Find/Change function has been bumped up almost out of recognition, now packed with full grep searching, and the ability to find and replace specific glyphs and insert anchored objects. Very usefully, the new Find/Change can be operated across multiple stories and multiple open documents in one pass.

The killer feature from CS2, QuickApply, has been extended in CS3 to include not just paragraph, character and object styles, but also menu commands, cell styles, scripts and text variables. Working with InDesign will be more productive than ever.

Our only complaints are that the new panel interface won’t snap to the edge of a second monitor, and the new version of Adobe Bridge still fails to offer much for InDesign users. Otherwise, InDesign CS3 is an upgrade you won’t regret.