Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign is a page design and layout solution designed mainly for graphic designers. The application helps to create, pre-flight, and publish documents for both platform on digital and print media. Adobe InDesign lets allows to design flyers, stationery, brochures, posters, magazines, books, and annual reports, with a wide range of professional layouts, images, and tables. It also lets users create interactive eBooks, PDFs, magazines, and other digital documents enhanced by slideshows, animations, audios, and videos.

The Adobe InDesign software tools that help designers collaborate with their editors and writers. This lets them design documents smarter and quicker. The software also supports integration with Adobe InCopy, software that lets copywriters and editors style text, track changes, and make simple layout modifications to a document while designers work on the same document simultaneously in Adobe InDesign — all without overwriting each other’s contributions. InDesign Users can even share colors, texts, graphics, and shapes since the software lets users access Creative Cloud Libraries. The latest version provides features that include end-notes, object height, width styles, paragraph borders, PDF accessibility improvements, fonts, and HTML export enhancements.

The software first release (version 1.0) on Mac OS X-native platform in August 31,1999. Latest version is 2020 (15.0.2) for Windows, macOS platform, released in December 2019.

Feature summary | InDesign (February 2020 release)

New and enhanced features | February 2020 release of InDesign

Community-contributed scripts

Now, InDesign also provides you the scripts created by the InDesign community. These scripts are displayed in the Scripts panel under the Community section.

• InsertTypographerQuote
• Clear Overrides
• UnicodeInjector
• Snap Margins to Text Frame
• Break Text Thread

Feature summary | InDesign (November 2019 release)

The new features and enhancements in the November 2019 release of InDesign (version 15.0).

SVG import

You can now import and place the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format files in InDesign documents. SVG is an XML-based vector image format to provide support for interactivity. In the previous releases, SVGs from CC libraries were imported as PNG files in InDesign, but now they can be imported directly.

Column rules

If you often design documents that contain multi-columns, the new column rule feature will let you add and control lines between columns in a multi-column text frame. Adding column rules helps you stylize the columns and add design elements. By default, the column rule is drawn from the ascent of the top line to the descent of the bottom line.

Support for South-East Asian languages

InDesign now includes a new text engine to support five new South East Asian languages: Thai, Burmese, Lao, Khmer, and Sinhala. Your documents can now include text composed in these scripts.

Variable fonts

InDesign now supports Variable Font, a new Open Type font format supporting custom attributes such as weight, width, slant, optical size, etc. You can change these custom attributes using convenient slider controls available when you click  in the Control panel, Character panel, Character Styles panel, and Paragraph Styles panel.

Search for variable icon in the font list to look for variable fonts. Alternatively, look for the variable icon next to the font name.

Reverse spell-check

If you’ve missed a spelling error while checking spellings manually, then you need not worry. You can now dictate the direction or order in which InDesign scans the text in your document for spelling errors.

Two new options, Backward and Forward are added in the Check spelling dialog. With these options, you can easily go back and correct the misspelled word.

Enhanced data merge

This release brings the following enhancements in the Data Merge panel:

• A new frame fitting option, Use Existing is added. Select this option to retain the individual frame fitting for image frames when performing data merge operation on them.
• Now, semicolon (;) is also supported as the field delimiter, in addition to tab and comma.

Adobe Asset linking

Adobe Asset Link enables you to directly link to assets in AEM Assets from within your InDesign 2020 document. If the original asset is modified in AEM Assets, you can quickly refresh the link to ensure that your InDesign document includes the latest version of the asset.

Here are the key capabilities newly introduced in Adobe Asset Link:

• Ability to import assets from AEM Assets by reference in InDesign documents.
• Ability to import low-resolution renditions in InDesign documents to be replaced by high-resolution original images later for efficient design creation.
• Ability to sort assets by relevance.
• Gallery view with large preview thumbnails.

Find similar images

You can now directly find graphic assets that are visually similar to the assets placed in your InDesign document. In previous versions, it was done only in the CC Libraries panel, but now you can search for similar assets on the canvas as well.

Onboarding resources

To provide you an enriched learning experience and help you get started, a variety of resources are provided in the Home screen of InDesign: guided tutorials, document templates, presets, recent document list, and more. This screen also offers a sneak-peek of the prominent new features released in the current version of the app.

Removal of Flash formats

Adobe decides to stop updating and distributing the Flash Player. To follow this decision, InDesign removed the support for placing, importing, exporting, and linking Flash files, such as .FLV, .F4V, and .SWF.

The removal of Flash formats required some user-interface changes, where options related to Flash formats are removed.

Stability and performance

In this release of InDesign, we fixed over 50+ issues that you reported to us. For example, issues related to core features, workflows, performance, stability, user-experience, and more. In addition, we made improvements in the features released in InDesign version 14.0, such as import PDF comments, Adjust layout.

Benefits

1. Users enhance the accessibility and reuse of the documents

The software provides features which help users enhance the accessibility and reuse of the documents they are exporting as PDF files using the app. Before they export their documents to PDF, they will be able to apply tags to page items so they can be accurately and conveniently viewed or read on a full-sized monitor, handheld device, or through a web browser.

2. Able to add alternative texts to graphics or objects

They will be able to add alternative texts to graphics or objects that they are tagging as figures. Alternative texts are words or phrases that are used to describe images. Viewers or readers who are visually impaired rely on alternative texts so they can recognize and understand the information and meaning conveyed by images. Through the aid of a screen-reading software the alternative texts are read aloud.

3. Users can also add tags

Users can also add tags to footnotes, anchored text frames, keyword indexes, captions, and table of contents that contain hyperlinks. If they want to hide unimportant objects, or printing texts or images; they can apply artifact tags. Artifact tags allow them to hide page items when they re-flow their exported PDFs in Adobe Acrobat or for viewing on handheld devices.

4. Enables users to insert end-notes into their documents

Adobe InDesign also enables users to insert end-notes into their documents. Because of this, their readers will be able to access references directly from the annotations they added to their texts.

5. Easily reposition objects and modify their sizes

To easily reposition objects and modify their sizes at once across their documents, the software include options in its Object Style dialog box which were not available in the earlier versions of the software. Now, users will be able to resize multiple objects; changing their widths, heights, or both. Also, using its Eyedropper tool, they can instantly apply the size or position of an object to another object within their documents.

Licensing

It is available for either as a single app license subscription or as part of Creative Cloud All Apps InDesign + all Adobe creative apps license subscription basis. For your licensing requirement, feel free to contact E-SPIN, we can supply in hassle free all-in-one solution, include hardware (desktop, laptop, workstation with operating system), Graphics tablet (digitiser, drawing tablet, drawing pad, digital drawing tablet, pen tablet, or digital art board) and third-party software application you may needed in one package solution.

System requirements