Atlanta InDesign User Group Meeting Notes Archive
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
On Tuesday, October 14, the Atlanta InDesign® user group was joined by some new faces from AIGA, as Noha Edell of Adobe Systems wowed the group with demonstrations of the new features in the Creative Suite (CS). She also cleared up some of the mystery around the Suites? it isn’t obvious that this is not just a new box but actually InDesign 3.0, Photoshop® 8.0, Illustrator® 11.0, GoLive® 7.0 and Acrobat® 6.0 Professional. If you’ve seen Noha present before, you know what a dynamic presenter she is, and her passion for the “new baby” was clear. There’s a lot to be excited about with the Creative Suites in general, and the InDesign CS in particular.
The biggest “wow” of the evening was surely nested styles: the ability to “string together” character styles within one paragraph style, using any character as a “trigger,” is a powerful timesaver. Complicated formatting with just one click…well, if you charge by the hour, you might want to pace yourself!
In addition, palette stashing and workspace management means you can personalize the InDesign CS environment — no more fistfights at shift-change because someone moved your palettes. For PageMaker refugees, the story editor is a welcome addition, and the personal version-management features of Version Cue® are a boon to those who are overwhelmed by files named “Final,” “Real Final,” “Don’t Use This Final,” and “Really Good Final.” Version Cue allows multiple versions of a file to be presented as if they are all one file. Old versions can be “promoted” to current, and all the CS applications can understand the version concept. You may think you don’t need it as “just one person,” but you’ll be amazed at how handy it is!
Going beyond print, InDesign CS now allows the placement of sounds and QuickTime movies. No, you can’t print movies. But you can make some really impressive PDFs when you combine the ability to place multimedia components with the ability to maintain InDesign layers during the translation to PDF. Prepress folks need not be alarmed: since InDesign CS allows the designer to place a high-res graphic as the “poster” for placed movies, a single file can serve for both print and online distribution. More features for printing: InDesign CS allows users to view individual separations, as well as a visual indication of ink limit problems. And PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3 files can be directly-exported from InDesign, with no third-party software.
We were glad to see so many new folks at the October meeting. Thanks to some earnest advertising by Adobe, and the participation of Elizabeth Peterson of AIGA in getting the word out to local AIGA members, we’ve reached some local InDesign users who had no idea there was a user group in Atlanta! We knew there had to be more InDesign fans in the metro area, and we do hope that word will spread. We encourage Atlanta area designers to come share what they know. Having problems? Bring those too; we’ll all gang up together and solve them.
Best regards,
Claudia McCue
Atlanta InDesign User Group
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