What's New in Adobe InDesign CS5.5?
InDesign CS6 is now available. I'm leaving this article in place in case you're considering CS6 and never moved to CS5.5.
For the first time in almost ten years, Adobe has released a "dot" upgrade for InDesign. Why did they do that, and just as importantly, should you upgrade?
To answer the first question, the publishing industry is changing at light speed these days and Adobe needs to keep up. This release clearly concentrates on Epub and other digital publishing but there are a couple nice additions for print design, as well.
That said, If you're currently using CS5 for print production, CS5.5 is not necessarily a must have upgrade but for anyone involved in electronic publishing (Epub, PDF) or anyone needing to repurpose content for the web this is a very compelling upgrade. Of course, only you can judge if an upgrade is worth the cost. So please read on.
In the past I've presented a top ten list of new features. This list, in keeping with the .5 theme will be a top five (with the customary honorable mentions). Please keep in mind that these are features that are new to CS5.5 only and represent my personal favorites based on the way I work. If you're using CS3 or CS4 please read the What's new in CS4 and the What's new in CS5 articles to get a full idea of what CS5.5 has to offer.
Click the topics below to read more.
No More Cut and Paste.
Anchored objects are great. They move with the flow of text, but they are cumbersome to set up. While it may not seem to fit in with Epub and HTML, it's quite common to use them to keep the contents within the flow of the document.
InDesign CS5.5 removes the drudgery of having to create an object, cut it to the clipboard and then paste it in line to create the anchored object. All objects in CS5.5 will have a small blue square in the upper right corner. Just drag it and drop it into the the text where you want it anchored.
The screenshots below show a selected object before and after the object has been anchored.
This is one feature that just about any InDesign user will fall in love with instantly.
Edit Once, Update All
How many times have you wanted to have identical text in different places or pages in a layout? For instance, you're working on stationery for a client and want to use boilerplate text on different size letterhead or envelopes.
In the past you could go through the trouble of exporting an InCopy story and then placing that multiple times but then you need to worry about externally linked files.
With linked stories, you start with a text frame that has the contents you want to link to. Choose the Edit>Place and Link Story command. You'll get a cursor that will will allow you draw a new frame or insert it into an already created text frame.
Either click and drag or if using an existing frame, just click. The text will be placed and you'll see a link in the links panel. Update the parent story and the links panel will show as out of date.
Linked stories display a small icon in the upper left corner of the frame. To navigate back to the original text, use the Edit Original command.
Links are not automatically updated. Among the user options is to update the link when closing the document and to removed forced line breaks.
Clean Code for HTML, Epub and PDF
HTML/EPUB
In the past, when exporting InDesign content to be repurposed on the web or in Epub, InDesign assigned a <p> tag to all paragraphs and assigned classes to them based on its paragraph style. While it worked okay visually, it produces less than stellar code which required a good bit of manual tweaking. A new feature in CS5.5 makes this export much cleaner and provides semantic mark up that can be styled easily using CSS.
A new choice in the Paragraph Styles and Character Style panel menus is Edit All Export Tags. This permits the user to map any paragraph or character style to an HTML tag. For instance. You might have a paragraph style called title. You could map this style to the <h1> tag. The screenshot below shows the dialog with few styles mapped.
Notice that the bold character style has been mapped to the <strong> tag. Defining all of these tags using CSS then becomes rather simple. The same content can be used in EPUB or HTML. If you wish to have InDesign generate classes for any specific style, you can name it in this dialog box. This would be useful for captions where you'd still use a p tag but have a special class for captions.
Tags and classes can also be mapped directly in the paragraph or character style by editing the definition.
It's important to realize that while this feature is a dramatic improvement to the prior behavior, it in no way eliminates the need for HTML and CSS skills.
When exporting to Tagged PDF the tags will be define in the Role Map in Acrobat.
Create Reading Order for Exported Documents
One of the weaker features of any InDesign export (Epub, HTML, PDF) has been the inability to easily determine the reading order of the page items. With Epub and HTML the problem is immediately visible when opening the files. However, for PDF it's a hidden problem since the page appears to be identical to the InDesign layout.
The new Articles Panel in InDesign CS5.5 simplifies this process by adding the ability to create relationships among the objects on the page. Just drag any object to the panel to create an article and then add child elements. In the simplest of terms you can think of the articles as chapters and the children as the contents. Again just drag and drop to change the order.
For those wishing to continue using the structure panel, it's still there and remains an option. When exporting to Epub, the use of the Articles Panel for document order will be an available option.
Publish InDesign Content to iPad and other Tablets
Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite of tools has been in use by major publishers for almost a year. These tools have been in development with a semi public prerelease program which required the download and installation of external applications and InDesign plugins.
For CS5.5, these tools have been integrated into the application itself. Two new panels, the Overlay Creator and Folio Builder have been added along with the required plugins.
The Overlay Creator is used to create the interactive content while the Folio Builder assembles all of the necessary files into a format compatible with tablets.
While the above are my top choices, there are some others that warrant a mention. Here's brief rundown:
Other Epub Enhancements
Graphic choices: Users can now choose PNG as well as GIF and JPG. PNG files support transparency. Also new is the ability to choose fixed size or "relative to page width." The latter sets a percentage and allows the image to scale in the Epub.
Cover images: InDesign can now generate a cover for you based on the first page of the document or you can designate a file of your choice.
Page order: You can allow InDesign to choose or you can designate the Articles Panel or XML structure.
Place footnote after its paragraph: Instead of converting footnotes to endnotes, they will appear after the cited paragraph.
Designate a paragraph style for breaks: There are no "page breaks" in Epub but by designating a paragraph style for document breaks, InDesign will create a new HTML file for each section, forcing it to a new page.
Remove soft returns: Soft returns are pretty much useless in Epub. This choice eliminates them during export.
New Interface Preference: Highlight Object Under Selection Tool
CS5 introduced a new feature that would highlight all objects as you mouse over them with the Selection Tool. I admit that I don't understand the hate that this feature has attracted but I do agree that there should be a user preference to turn it off. Now there is.
Multi-Version Backsave
From CS2 to CS5 each version InDesign was capable of saving back only one version. While the present is no indication of the future, it appears that Adobe may have long range plans when introducing the IDML format in CS4. While it won't be of any help for versions older than CS4, it's good to know that content can now be backsaved more than one version.
Will this continue to be the case? We'll have to wait until the next version ships to find out.
