CS5 is here!
PSU Market Square Building
Event DetailsOn May 13th we had a great meeting celebrating the release of Adobe CS5. Thank you all for coming, and for those of you who missed it, be sure to look into what's new!
Here is an excellent meeting summary written by group member Rick Rudge.
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Not only was our Chapter Representative, Paul Erdman going to show us the many new features of InDesign CS5 but he was also going to raffle off the Premium box set Creative Suites 5, and they even had a special cake to commemorate the event of the new release, so there was a lot of excitement at this meeting. Paul knew the many new features well, and there was a lot of jaw-dropping oh's and ah's during the demonstration. Here are some highlights from my notes.
There's also a quick run-down of InDesign CS5's new features on the Adobe website (www.adobe.com/products/indesign/whatsnew/).
• Simplified object selection and editing! When you hover over a graphic a little circle comes up. You can actually manipulate the graphic using the Direct Select tool or the regular Select tool without going to the tool bar. Stuff like resizing whole groups of images at once is fantastic. There's also some nice features like a quick and easy way of rounding corners, etc. All box frames now have a fifth little handle at the upper-right (very similar to the text linking box at the lower-right of a text frame) that activates this feature.
• Integration with Adobe CS Review! This is for reviewing with fellow design people, changes can be made quickly and easily. There is also a way of tracking text and graphic changes! You can easily mark up text directly from within InDesign, tracking various revision changes.
• InDesign redesigned its layers panel! This makes it closer to the way that Photoshop and Illustrator users handle layers. In many instances this is a lot better than constantly moving one layer to the back all the time. You simply click on the layer you want to work on from inside the layers panel instead, and all without ungrouping anything.
• Create Flash animations from inDesign! That's right, we're talking about the ability to create and export animated Flash content from within InDesign now. InDesign has a new Animation Panel that has a lot of presets, or you can make your own. Animations can be exported as both Flash Player (SWF) and Flash CS5 Pro (FLA) formats. Furthermore, the same InDesign file can be used for both print and Flash for use on the web.
• Multiple page sizes! I'm very happy to see that you can now create separate page sizes within the same document. The demonstration showed the ability to create fold-out type pages inside facing page mode, using the page pallet. It would be possible to have an 8-1/2" x 11" first page, an 11" x 17" sized second page and a business card sized third page; all within the same file. Of course the CS4 feature of working sideways on some pages still works great.
• Document-Installed fonts! Well, not exactly, but when you create a Package of your layout document, for your output service, InDesign CS5 activates the fonts inside of that package. There is no need to specially-install those fonts just for this particular file. InDesign parses them automatically. No more (or at least fewer) missing font issues.
• Paragraphs that span or split columns! You can create text that spans and splits into multiple columns in just a few steps. This is done through Paragraph Styles. Paul showed us how you can split a bulleted listing into two columns from within the same text. You can easily add or take out anything from within that list and it will stay together beautifully.
• Adobe has created a Mini Bridge! You can now access images while staying inside of InDesign. Paul was able to reduce the size of the Mini Bridge panel to the size of a toolbar button on the left.
• Live Captioning on photos and images! Captioning can be automatically imported from individual image metadata information. Whenever you import the image, it will have the option of using that description of the image with it.
• Step and Repeat! I've been very excited about how InDesign CS4 helps me with matching up files for stepping and repeating layouts without having to lay down guides or grids, but in CS5 there's a whole menu command for it. Edit > Step & Repeat.
There are many other new features and improvements to the older CS4 that weren't mentioned but these are some of the most interesting ones.
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