Adobe® InDesign® CS5 Bible

Preface

After seven versions of InDesign, you have to wonder what more can Adobe do to improve it in meaningful ways. In the case of InDesign CS5—the eighth version of the leading desktop publishing program—Adobe came up with two directions for major improvement.

One is reworking the selection and object-manipulation tools to make them more straightforward to use while also more flexible and powerful. Such changes are felt in many places, from the Layers and Links panels to the basic Selection and Direct Selection tools, as well as in the controls over frame fitting, object styles, step-and-repeat, page controls, and in the new multiple-page-size, text column-spanning, and Gap tool features.

The other major change is moving InDesign further into the realm of nonprint publishing, in this edition through the addition of major new animation capabilities that let you create interactive Adobe SWF files from InDesign. Plus there are a raft of improvements relating to hyperlinks, interactive buttons, use of media files such as video and sounds, and PDF file creation.

If you don't work on nonprint documents, I think you'll find the selection and object-manipulation changes more than sufficient reason to move to InDesign CS5. But I also urge you to become familiar with the creation of nonprint documents—in this electronic world, information will be published in all sorts of ways, and sticking with just one medium is a path to obsolescence. That's why this book gives more weight to nonprint ...