New York City InDesign User Group

Chapter Homepage Meeting Summary Archive

This was great! Wish they were held more often.

Meeting Summary: Introducing InDesign CS5

Thu, May 13th, 2010 at 6:30 PM

School of Visual Arts Theater

Event Details

On May 13, more than 200 members attended the NYC InDesign User Group meeting and were rewarded with a soup-to-nuts look at the recently launched InDesign CS5. Making attendance even more exciting was the fact that Michael Murphy, host of The InDesigner podcasts and author of Adobe InDesign CS4 Styles: How to Create Better, Faster Text and Layouts.

Among the new features Michael demonstrated were:

Simplified Transformations: Using the content grabber and the ability to transform multiple objects without grouping them.
Browsing for linked files in the new Mini Bridge panel without needing to open the InDesign file
Live Captions: A new text variable feature which allows the user to easily add captions to graphics using that image's metadata.
The Tool Hints panel: A new interactive panel which displays information about the selected tool.
The Gap Tool: This new tool manages white space instead of objects.
Multiple page sizes in one document.
Split and Span Columns: New features in text handling now allow paragraphs to either span multi-column text frames or split a single column into multiple columns.
Balanced Columns: A new text frame attribute forces all columns in a multi-column text frame to be balanced vertically.
New animation features for SWF export.

Michael also has a podcast showing even more new features that can be viewed at http://www.theindesigner.com/blog/feature-by-feature-review-of-indesign-cs5.

After Michael's presentation, Adobe's Noha Edell gave a brief rundown on best practices for EPUB creation and editing. Noha demonstrated several third-party applications that help the EPUB process including:

Adobe Digital Editions for reading EPUBs
Springy for opening and editing EPUB archives
Calibre for managing EPUB collections and converting formats
Stanza for reading EPUBs on the iPhone

You can download a PDF list of Noha's EPUB resources at the bottom of this page.

Special offers for NYC InDesign User Group members

From Gridiron Software:
Save $200 on Gridiron Flow (www.gridironsoftware.com). Get your copy for only $99.

From onOne Software:
Save 20% on any onOne product (www.ononesoftware.com/store).

From Premedia Systems:
Save 10% on PDF Comparator (see "Next Meeting" below for more information) (www.premediasystems.com/pdfc.html).

Use your discount codes at checkout. Find your discount codes on the NYC-IDUG home page (indesignusergroup.com/chapters/newyorkcity). Don't forget to check out the Member Benefits area as well for other discounts and offers (indesignusergroup.com/members/benefits_members.php).

Thank you

A big thank you to our presenters for the evening, Michael Murphy and Noha Edell as well as those who donated prizes for our raffle: Adobe Press, GridIron Software, onOne Software, O'Reilly Media, and Adobe Systems.

Comments from attendees

I love these meetings! Great people, info & environment.

Another great Michael Murphy presentation.

This was great! Wish they were held more often.

Noha is terrific!

Next Meeting

Our next meeting is scheduled for September 7. We're still working out all of the details, but to start, Scott Citron will briefly demonstrate PDF Comparator from Premedia Systems. While there is no shortage of applications that compare text and image content in PDFs, PDF Comparator is an application that harnesses Mac OS X’s built-in ability to render PDFs to compare two PDFs, one to the other, pixel-by-pixel, as they will print.