Software Review: Adobe Master Collection – InDesign CS6 From Adobe Systems

This is the fifth of a series of reviews that will cover what is contained in the Adobe CS6 Master Collection. Adobe releases CS6 with four separate suites of products. They are Design Standard, Design & Web Premium, Production Premium, Master Collection. Add to that, they also have the Creative Cloud – a subscription based suite that gives you access to all of the individual products for a $49.99 per month subscription fee. You can go online to compare what is contained in each version. The goal of this series is to define what each product does and provide information on what the new version brings to the table.

First introduced in 1999, Adobe InDesign forms the base of the publishing platform called the Creative Suite. It is targeted at designers, publishers, and those who job it is to design professional layouts including periodical publications, posters, print media, and more. It is now taking on more responsibility in the world of electronic publishing and supports the ability for content consumption on various electronic devices.

In effect, InDesign is a page-composition program that lets you take a variety of elements from different sources and combine them to make multipage documents. Once you have all of the objects together, InDesign will let you put them together on the page to create your composition. While you can also create single page documents, InDesign is really meant to create larger multipage compositions. Many people use InDesign to create for standard print, it can be just as useful for electronic delivery via PDF, Web page generation, and mobile devices.

So what is new with InDesign CS6?

• Alternate Layout – now provides you with the ability to reuse content in multiple layouts. Say you need to adapt a print ad for different sizes or orientations. For digital publishing, you can design both the horizontal and vertical layouts for a .folio file in a single InDesign file. Or create similar but customized layouts for different devices, such as the Apple iPad and the Motorola Xoom, within one InDesign document. The alternate layout makes it easy to adapt your primary layout and let InDesign adjust the rest.

• Liquid Layout – gives you the ability to repurpose a layout for pages with different dimensions. You can apply liquid page rules to individual pages and then when you create an alternate layout, InDesign applies those rules to arrange the content in relationship to the new page size. Some of the page rules include Re-center, for devices of different sizes; Guide-Based, for simple pages that include mostly text with few images; and Object-based, for adjusting how each object will be adjusted.

Article Author: T. Michael Testi

T. Michael Testi is a writer and a photographer out of Edmond Oklahoma. You can see his photographic and art work at T Michael Imaging.

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