To the excitement of all, Mike Wallen, a Senior Product Manager for Adobe, unveiled the new CS2 for us in this last meeting. Making a good start with his embarrassing story about his recent skateboarding accident, he dove right into the magnificence that is CS2, remarking on how the idea for the Creative Suite is coming to a full fruition — a complete platform for the communications business. The highlights of CS2 versus CS is the greater control, greater productivity, and greater creative freedom that have been implemented.
Tooting the horn for the Adobe Bridge (for both InDesign® and CS2) is the expansion of the basic structure. The inclusion of extended metadata fields and a metadata search makes file management easier. Also, the ability to apply metadata labels to design files makes organizing projects more useful. The ease of switching from a program to the Bridge, as well as the thumbnail preview of InDesign files, images, etc., makes the integration something worth checking out.
Some of the enhancements in InDesign couldn’t have come at a better time:
- A new Photoshop® integration allows for control of individual layers of a PSDs also allowing for image integrity and nondestructive originals.
- “Snippets” let you select elements of a document and move those pieces to new documents and other projects. The snippets retain all of the metadata from the original file and bring them into the new document.
- Object Styles behave like paragraph styles. Use them for more efficient formatting of graphic, text, and frame-level attributes.
- Microsoft Word support, including style mapping, support of footnotes, and the functionality of it in InCopy®, has made a giant leap in text-formatting support.
And a feature we have all been waiting for:
- Backwards compatibility with InDesign CS — you can use the InDesign interchange format to share files between versions.
These are just a few of the many new features we flew through over the course of the evening. In fact, the evening was so information-rich that our Q&A session was brief. Here are some questions folks handed to Steve at the break, with brief responses.
There’s also lots of information on Adobe’s website:
Q: Table styles?
A: You can use a plug-in from WoodWing called Smart Styles.
Q: Is there a way to coordinate color settings?
A: There is a shared color engine in CS2, and the synchronization is easy and clearly marked in Bridge Center as part of the Suite.
Q: Is Version Cue® “fixed”?
A: Version Cue is now easier to use and manage, and my (Steve's) few tests so far show it’s pretty-well built.
Q: Is Bridge standalone?
A: Yes, Bridge is a standalone app and can even help manage non-Adobe docs!
Q: Is running CS2 and CS at the same time potentially dangerous?
A: It isn't supposed to be — after all, we can save back from CS2 to CS. But I'd avoid running both at the same time — because I worry a lot.
Q: How can one get the bottom of a text frame to actually line up with the bottom of the text, and therefore have a meaningful bottom y-coordinate?
A: To make the bottom of text frames hug text (and therefore have a meaningful y-coordinate), use the fitting commands (in particular, fit frame to content).
Notes by Lydia Jenson (with additions by Steve Laskevitch).
