What’s New in Adobe InDesign CS6?
We’re hard at work on our next Application Test Suite-Intermediate Files for Windows 8 applications. This suite covers four new Adobe applications: InDesign CS6, Illustrator CS6, Photoshop CS6, and Acrobat XI. These ATS-IFs will be sold as the Windows 8-Adobe CS6 Suite. Here’s what our investigation of Adobe CS6 has turned up:
Digital Publishing
New presets allow for designing for Web, Print, and mobile digital e-readers. The preset templates for digital publishing are set to pixels with orientations for common devices, including mobile devices, e-readers, common web specifications, iPad, and Android platforms. Using Primary Text Frames, content can be selected to always remain a master item that will reflow and override on layout pages.
Integration with Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe has begun licensing its programs through an interactive cloud space that allows for better integration and updating of software on multiple devices. This new cloud requires a monthly fee to keep activated. It allows for collaboration on files amongst group user settings.
Alternate Layouts
Layouts designed for printing and standard sizes can be created in the same files as layout templates for e-reading devices such as iPads or Android tablets. Alternate layouts are best used in conjunction with liquid layout, which copies text, paragraph, and character styling to allow for quicker redesign for multiple formats. Smart Text Reflow is a feature that can be activated to reflow text seamlessly into new formats.
Liquid Layouts
Create liquid pages by using liquid page rules to quickly reformat material for different viewing/printing sizes. It keeps text and images in the same aspect ratio as the original intent, while changing size and/or orientation.
Linked Content Options
The Linked Content function allows you to duplicate items (stories, text frames, page items, interactive objects, and even groups) and place them on other pages either within the same document or in another document. Grouped interactive objects, text frames, and page items can be contained in a content link with or without the frames that they were created within. The link options can be customized allowing for greater flexibility when designing for multiple device specifications. Content Collector and Placer tools allow you to copy content and items through the Content Conyevor, which takes your links’ roots with you to create re-linked documents across various layouts. Custom Style Mapping allows you to take text styles and style groups and map them across platforms (from print to mobile). Preserve Local Edits allows you to tweak style changes in new formats without updating the styles globally across other platforms.
Interactivity
Create interactive PDF forms through InDesign CS6 export to interactive PDF. The Buttons and Forms library allows for many tools to design forms. These forms can also be made to be accessible via voiced instructions.
Language Support
Using Adobe World-Ready composers, several additional non-Latin script fonts can be used with InDesgin CS6. The World-Ready composer can handle Indic scripts, such as Devanagari, and supports several Indic languages, such as Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Oriya, Malayalam, and Kannada. InDesign CS6 is available as a Middle Eastern edition that has support for Arabic and Hebrew, and provides right-to-left directional typesetting and enhanced diacritic positioning.
Grayscale Preview
Although it’s a simple addition, many InDesign users are excited about the introduction of a grayscale preview and export for their work.