New York City InDesign User Group
Meeting Notes Archive
April 3, 2007
If you were present at the April 3 meeting of the NY InDesign User Group, you are a part of history.
More than 325 excited members jammed themselves into FIT's Katie Murphy Auditorium to get a first-hand look at the newly released Adobe InDesign CS3. With more than 100 new features, choosing what to show in one short evening was a challenge. Here's a brief synopsis of the night:
Adobe's Noha Edell opened with a quick overview of the various new suites, and pointed out the most significant new features InDesign CS3. Noha also touched on pricing and upgrades for the new products. For complete pricing and feature info, go to or dial Adobe's toll-free Customer Service number, 800-833-6687.
Chapter Rep Scott Citron next took the lead by showing off the new screen-saving user interface now found in InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Afterward he demoed one of the biggest improvements to InDesign: Effects. No longer limited to only objects, now InDesign can apply sophisticated transparency effects to frames, fills, objects, and even text. Considering where page layout was only a few years ago, this is a huge advancement (and timesaver) for designers.
Along those lines, Scott showed a neat trick not previously possible where live, editable type can be made to appear filled with an image. The key to this trick to set type to 0% opacity and click on Create Knockout Group. Doing so will allow the image beneath the text frame to show through.
Scott also showed some new preferences. One that raised a cheer from the crowd is a pref that prevents users from accidentally converting a basic frame into a text frame by clicking. A couple of others are the addition of Agates as a measurement unit, a choice of where imported Snippets are placed (original location or cursor), and a checkbox that preserves the dimensions of images when relinking.
Noha next launched into Part I of her demo. The biggest reaction was to the new Multi-place cursor, a feature that allows users to select multiple files and formats and place them consecutively without reloading the Place Gun. Noha also showed the new Pages panel (palettes are gone and now named panels), which allows thumbnails of pages for easy navigation.
Following a quick break, during which we sold a record number of raffle tickets, Noha resumed her presentation which included the new Table and Cell Styles, improved Quick Apply feature, and powerful Find/Change dialog that allows search and replace for text, glyphs, and objects. New to this feature is also the use of GREP (General Regular Expressions Parser) for finding complicated word and punctuation strings.
Scott Citron
NY IDUG Chapter Rep
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