InDesign CS6

16.05.2012
Adobe has a winner of an upgrade in . The combination of improvements to its digital publishing tools, PDF forms authoring, language support, and dozens of workflow refinements make this an upgrade that will surely pay for itself.

The most visible improvements center, not surprisingly, around digital publishing—specifically converting content for one medium or device to another. Adobe has clearly listened to user requests and updated its aging document model to make it more useful for today’s workflows. One of the biggest engineering hurdles was how to intelligently link content from one document to another, so that if you made changes in one place, they would update in other places.

In CS6, Adobe smartly extended the familiar “placed” content model, wherein graphics not native to a layout are linked to original content, and where users must manually update those linked items when the originals change. In CS6, you can link from one object in an InDesign layout to other objects in different layouts within the same document. You can define one frame as a Parent frame, and then link to it from Child frames in other layouts. The program remembers graphics, text, and formatting. If the Parent content changes, the Child items indicate that change with a warning badge for that link. You can then choose to update the link and its content.

To accommodate this new functionality, Adobe had to change the document structure. Now, similar to the approach Quark pioneered years ago in QuarkXPress, one document may contain multiple layouts, and each layout can link some of its content to the others. Layouts are conceptually similar to sections in previous versions of InDesign, but show up under new tabs in the Pages panel.