InDesign

Arriving two years after CS5, and a year after CS5.5, CS6 is now available for pre-order, with Adobe promising delivery "within 30 days." Adobe's subscription-based Creative Cloud takes a central role in the massive release, which includes 14 CS6 applications and four Creative Suites. The all-you-can download plan is yours for $49.99 per month, which is the cost if you sign up for an annual contract (it's $74.99 per month for month-to-month membership).

In the latest "sneak peeks" of the applications in the upcoming CS6 release, Adobe has moved from Photoshop and Illustrator to Dreamweaver and InDesign. The interesting thread connecting these latter two is that both feature new capabilities for creating adaptive layouts. This makes perfect sense considering the accelerated usage of mobile devices.

Adobe® Creative Cloud™ is a creative hub where you can explore, create, publish, and share your work using Adobe Creative Suite® desktop applications, Adobe Touch Apps, and services together for a complete ideation-to-publishing experience. The vision of Adobe Creative Cloud is to turn previously difficult, disparate workflows into one intuitive, natural experience, allowing you to create freely and deliver ideas on any desktop, tablet, or handheld device.

At its MAX 2010 worldwide conference in LA this week, Adobe will unveil its Digital Publishing Suite, a set of turnkey hosted services that will allow publishers to more easily create robust, interactive digital publications. The Digital Publishing Suite has already been used to create the iPad edition of Wired and The New Yorker.

Excerpted from InDesign Type: Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign, 2nd Edition (Adobe Press)

By Nigel French

Full press release below.

Adapted from Adobe InDesign CS4 Bible (Wiley Publishing)
By Galen Gruman

A clipping path is essentially a shape that acts like a cutout mask—anything inside the shape displays and anything outside does not. It’s a very handy way of displaying just the pieces of a graphic that you want to display, such as masking out extraneous background or focusing on a specific portion of a larger image. Clipping paths are also frequently used to control text wrap around graphics.

InDesign can work with clipping paths that are already part of an imported TIFF, JPEG, Photoshop EPS or Photoshop image, or with clipping paths you create in InDesign. And no matter the source of the clipping path, InDesign lets you modify it.

There are obvious benefits to spending the extra time and effort grouping your layers into folders and naming them appropriately.

For one you will appreciate the organization if you have to work further on the file after considerable amount time went by. Second, your coworkers or your css programmer will appreciate a neat file as well.

There are some less obvious and immediate advantages to such tidy practices. Design is not done on paper or on screen. Design is something you do in your mind. You continuously evaluate your work and make further design decisions while you work. Design is an internal dialogue and the result is your design work.

When I launched InDesign CS4 for the first time, it took all of about ten seconds to see that I was going to like what I found. After a few hours of using it, my suspicions were confirmed. Every release of InDesign has brought new and improved features and speed bumps, but none have brought more than Adobe’s latest offering of its flagship page layout application.

Have you ever had a problem like the the picture above in InDesign?

All those red zones are above 300% inkt percentage.

So you need to change those percentages, there are a lot of ways of doing it, with profiles and so on...

I found an interesting way in Photoshop. Here it is...

Open the picture in Photoshop, see that you have your info panel visible.
When you hover over a problem area in your picture you can read the inkpercentages in the info panel.