Introduction to InDesign CS6

The new InDesign CS6 comes with interesting new features and ample enhancements that offer perfect precision control over design elements such as layout, typography, and the publishing friendly nature that suits every media.

With Adobe’s Digital Publishing suite, designing for every facet of digital media such as publishing, tablets, and the web are simplified than ever before. An additional advantage of using the latest software is well-matched using of familiar InDesign workflow for publishing and digital mediums.

Top 10 New Features in InDesign CS6

The following are the latest features that add more value to the InDesign CS6.

Liquid Content
Alternate Layouts
Digital Publishing
Text Frame Fitting
Linked content
Content Conveyer
Interactivity
EPUB & HTML5
Productivity Enhancements
Extension Manager CS6

1. Liquid Content

Priorities of design have drastically changed in the past few years. With the increased use of smartphones and tablets in the communication world, designers are compelled to create multiple versions of their designs that flow well between devices irrespective of the end-user’s variants.

The liquid layout is the latest feature that helps designers to create content for multiple page sizes and orientations across diverse device platforms. By applying liquid page rules, you can determine how design elements of your page appear when you create an alternative layout of a different size or ratio.

Select a page with the Page tool, then choose the liquid page rule from the control bar, or you may manually select the tool in Liquid Layouts Panel in Windows > Interactive > Liquid Layout.

2. Alternate Layout

Every designer comes across a daunting situation after completing a design to a particular size as per the client requirement. But, the phone rings at the last moment, and the client asks from the other end of the phone, Can you change the template dimensions to a new size and send it immediately? All the labour you invested so far went into vain. Relax; the new InDesign has a solution so you can quickly fix the sizes avoiding hours of the pain-stalking crafting part.

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With the new Alternate Layout feature in InDesign CS6, the job is just a few clicks away. Adobe understood the importance of the requirement in the increasingly demanding print and digital mediums. With this new feature, designers enjoy the advantage of creating page sizes of the same document in the same file.

For example, you can design a document with multiple variants as horizontal and vertical layouts.

You can select an alternate layout by any one of the following methods

Choose Layout > Create Alternate Layout

Choose to Create Alternate Layout from the Pages panel menu.

3. Digital Publishing

Another clearly visible improvement of InDesign CS6 is its Digital Publishing section. Here, aside from the print and web intents, now users can specify the digital publishing intent before creating a document. Most importantly, the new feature is intended to easily convert the content from one medium to another or from one device specifications to another. It doesn’t surprise Adobe enthusiasts and designing communities as they were expecting the feature to be included in the InDesign sooner or later, as the old document model of Adobe seriously needed change that is badly required for today’s workflows.

Previously, the graphics that don’t belong to the original content of a layout are linked, and users have to update the linked items manually when the original changes. In this version, Adobe vigorously extended its reach far from its former. Now, it is possible to link an object in a layout to other objects with other document layouts. You can choose to define one layout as the Parent frame, and the other layouts will be the child frames. InDesign intelligently remembers the content of the Parent and its connections. If the content from the Parent frame is modified, the Child items indicate the changes in the link. A warning is displayed in the child layouts, and it can be easily updated with a click.

4. Text frame fitting

Playing around with the text frame options is always a tough job for designers. To ease the job to a great extent, InDesign introduced flexible width column options. With the help of this feature, you can easily control the number and width of the column by resizing the text frame.

Once the set numbers are reached, the columns are automatically added, and in case the file reached the maximum column width, the column will be deleted.

5. Linked Content

Linked Content is the functionality defined to duplicate images and content of one page easily on several other pages. The content can vary anything from links, text frames, interactive objects on the page, groups or the whole page items. The linkage is made possible independently irrespective of the frames they are contained in.

A major advantage of the linked content is perceived while working on multi-device publication jobs. However, the feature is made applicable for all types of publications. The linked content feature can be shared with the Alternate Layouts to use the content in the generation layouts.

Edit > Place and Link

6. Content Conveyor

Content Collector and Content Placer tools play a vital role in making linked content handy to the designers. They allow you to duplicate easily and place the content on an open InDesign document. The content conveyor displays the copied content, which in return used to place and link content between multiple documents.

Custom style mapping

The merits of Linked Content is not limited to the content mentioned above. Copying and mapping the style of various forms of content as Text, Paragraphs, Tables, and Cells has become easier than ever. You can easily copy and map the style of one object to another.

7. Interactivity

PDF Forms

InDesign CS6 has made it much easier to design a form and export them directly to PDF. The latest version buttons and libraries are loaded with content that you can use to design interactive forms. Now it is not necessary to post-process the PDF forms in Adobe Acrobat. Rather, you can choose to specify the tab orders and tooltips through InDesign.

Adobe Edge

With the help of the Interaction design tool and Adobe Edge web motion, it is easy to work on animated content on websites. By using web standards such as JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3. It is possible to place an Edge package on your layout to give it interaction and animation.

Language Support

World-Ready composers with HunSpelli dictionaries came together to add an advantage of using several world languages into InDesign.

Most of the languages in InDesign are shipped from the HunSpell dictionaries. HunSpell being an open-source platform, users can choose to download the required spelling and hyphenation dictionaries of the intended languages.

8. EPUB & HTML5

In the new InDesign CS6, exporting workflows for EPUB files are simplified to a greater extent. Users can choose the EPUB version which they want to export the file. Alongside with the added features, the dialog box to export EPUB files is rearranged for further convenience.

HTML5

Quite a lot of improvements were added to the export to HTML for convenience and efficiency. Few of the enhanced supports are

Style information obtained from external CSS files
Support for Flash-based videos
Access to link multiple CSS files
Linking multiple external java scripts

9. Productivity Enhancements

Adobe adds value to its products by enhancing the existing tools and making valuable additions from time to time. Similarly, the new InDesign CS6 has its set of productivity enhancements that helps to make the users job

Split window

It is now easy to compare two different layouts of the same document. The split window feature allows you to split the existing window into two panes for easily comparing the contents of both the layouts.

To access the split window option, you can choose the following methods

Click on the spit window button in the lower right corner of the document
Window> Arrange > Split Window
Open the Layout menu in Pages panel and click Split Window

Save in previous formats

Use the InDesignMarkup Language (IDML) to save the existing document in a previous version format to help others who haven’t updated the software. The IDML format files can be opened with from CS4 or versions released after that.

10. Extension Manager InDesign CS6

Adobe extension manager is always an add-on for the loyal Adobe fans. As always, the CS6 version also had its set of improvements in the extension manager.

One of the many interesting features added to the version is the quick search tool. Unlike the older versions, with the help of the new search tool, it became much easier to search for file extensions through names and metadata tags.

The dependency feature is one more important addition in the versions, With the help of the dependency feature, one extension can have multiple dependency extensions, and the dependency information can be specified in the MXI files.

With all the newly added features in Adobe InDesign CS6, it is once again proved that InDesign is the most flexible and user-friendly software when it comes to publishing and layout management. With the increased focus on designing layouts for multiple devices, it is easy for designer communities and enthusiasts to expect Adobe’s increasing focus on diverse vertical management.

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