Product: InDesign 1.5
Company: Adobe Systems
Website: http://www.adobe.com
Estimated Street Price: $699.00
Upgrade Price from InDesign 1: $99.00
Review By: Julien JAY

Features

Creating a document with Adobe InDesign is a child game! First select the size of the document you want to create and its orientation (you can create own defined documents size by simply typing the size values in the appropriate box's fields). Once you did that, a page is displayed on the screen and a purple frame indicates you the margins that you defined before (you can change the borders settings). Now let your creativity expresses itself in order to design beautiful layouts for ads. Creating high impact layouts is very easy if you've got a little bit of imagination. You can draw on the page text frames and miscellaneous shapes. Every Indesign object is displayed in a frame (that can be hidden) and can be resized using the appropriate arrows dots. The text settings you can customize are very complete as you can choose the font you want to use (even if you don't get a preview of it in the font's list) but you can also set the incline rate, size, line-spacing, horizontal & vertical scales and much more. InDesign also offers advanced paragraph features that allow to center, justify, aligned right/left, justify with the last line at left/center/right your text and more. Pictures can be imported into any composition's frame as InDesign supports a wide variety of picture files including Adobe Photoshop formats (AI, PSD, EPS, TIFF, DCS, Scitex CT, JPEG, BMP, GIF, PCX, WMF, and PICT/PCT). An interesting feature of InDesign is that you choose to adapt the picture to the size of the frame you have drawn or to adapt the frame to the picture's size. The picture-positioning feature is really useful when you have to put big pictures in small areas as you can choose to proportionally adjust the picture to the frame size. InDesign also offers some settings to boost your work by displaying poor quality pictures while you're working; however using this feature for a while we noticed some strange issues. There's a thing that scared all prepress users : as they often use heavy graphic files, when they import them in their document the DTP software should be fluid enough. Here adobe has done a great job since editing documents containing 100Mb pictures or more is almost fast & fluid while at the same time no specific slowing down is encountered. It's clear that the core of the program is really optimized to deliver high performance.

Creativity

As I wrote before, InDesign lets everyone express creativity by offering advanced tools such as gradient, which allows making gradient texts/shapes in a few clicks. Simply choose a new gradient starting and end color, then type your text and click on the gradient color button and look at the results! Gradient color can also be applied to shape and this time you can draw the gradient direction. Note that you can also create great looking radial gradients. A new small feature has been introduced in InDesign 1.5: you can now reverse the gradient direction simply by clicking the option in the gradient palette. A multiple undo feature enables everyone to easily undo the changes that have just been made easily. The advanced polygon settings will allow you by simply changing the number of sides and the 'star' setting to draw nice stars shapes easily. The line tool also allows you to draw arrows and different dotted lines based on the settings you specify. The brand new 'text on a path' feature brings more creativity as you can align text to every path and even thread text from one path to another in a few mouse clicks. You can even apply distortion effects to text on a path such as gravity or 3D Ribbon: it'll add high impact effect to your creations. InDesign 1.5 now includes advanced tools to better manage Bézier paths: you can create a hand-drawn or roughly sketched graphic using the pencil tool and you can, like in Illustrator, remove part of a path with the erase tool, as well as unwanted bumps with the smooth tool. Also you can easily add or delete points or adjust path-point handles to edit the shape of a path. The new free transform tool allows users to rotate, reflect, and skew objects efficiently, which works like similar tools in Photoshop and Illustrator. With this new release you can also apply text wrap to any bitmap or vector image that has a preview proxy, including EPS and PDF files. InDesign 1.5 comes with a new function that allows you to resize ellipses and rectangles from a center point. It works great and it's very useful. InDesign 1.5 also introduced the eye-dropper tool that allows at least to retrieve the color of an imported picture by example in order to use exactly the same color in a shape or in the text. InDesign 1.5 developers have been apparently inspired by Microsoft Office 2000 as the Eye dropper tool of InDesign also allows to copy the attributes applied to one object and instantly apply them to another.

Text tools

Adobe didn't forget that publishing software need advanced text tools. That's why InDesign 1.5 comes with multilingual customizable dictionaries as well as hyphenation dictionaries that'll check that every line correctly ends. Prepress users know that before printing a document the fonts must be checked, so InDesign lets you create a list of all the fonts used in a file, even in placed EPS and PDF files, using the Find Font command. For those huge text documents InDesign offers an advanced search/replace text feature. InDesign 1.5 features a new small enhancement to change the case of the selected text without having to retype it all. With InDesign 1.5 you can import Microsoft Word text files and even apply InDesign paragraph styles to the text you've just imported. New to InDesign 1.5 you can Justify text vertically within a frame, or align it to the top, center, or bottom of a frame. Page numbering features are also in the box as you can automatically link pages to another along with updating the numbers of this pages. Below is the new Text tools palette: