While designers have always been called on to reformat existing projects to accommodate new page formats and dimensions (such as creating a printed ad from a Web page or vice versa), the demand has never been as prevalent as it is today. Because of the popularity of the iPad and other mobile devices of various sizes and configurations, designers now commonly create multiple layouts that share the same content. Adobe’s new Adaptive Design tools promise to make that process easier. Adaptive Design tools include Alternate Layouts, Liquid Layout, and Linked Content.

Before CS6, if InDesign users needed to produce multiple dimensions and formats for one publication, they had to create and maintain separate documents or duplicate objects onto multiple page sizes in a single document. With CS6, you can add one or more alternate-sized layouts to an existing InDesign document, and InDesign copies your existing content onto the new page size.

Now, you get the option of letting InDesign re-shape the existing content to an appropriate size for the new pages, or simply copy everything as-is onto the new pages. This is handy for generating a horizontal iPad layout from a vertical layout, for example. Once you create the Alternate Layout, it behaves exactly the same as any other InDesign layout—but new objects added to the original layout are not duplicated on the Alternate Layout.

You can control the way InDesign handles the conversion of page objects to the Alternate Layout by adjusting the Liquid Layout rules, and by customizing the text styles in the new layout. Helpfully, InDesign duplicates the styles from the original layout into the new layout—you can change them in the new layout, and it won’t affect the styles in your original layout.