Adobe has taken over development, support, and sales of Middle Eastern versions of InDesign. New features in the Middle Eastern version include support for tables in the Story Editor, improved Kashida justification, enhanced diacritic positioning, and other text-handling improvements.

Besides InDesign’s existing Single-Line Composer and Paragraph Composer to control how your lines of text break within a paragraph, there are two new options: World-Ready Single-Line Composer and World-Ready Paragraph Composer. These take into consideration the requirements of eastern languages when breaking lines of text.

Placeholder text use is also improved: You can now fill a text frame with placeholder text not only in Roman script, but also with Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. In addition, InDesign now supports Indian languages, including Hindi Marathi, Gujarati Tamil, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Oriya Malayalan, and Kannada.

Even if you’re not involved in ePub, tablet publishing, or creating PDF forms, InDesign has plenty of enticing new features to make your workflow more efficient. For example, all frames that contain placed content now have a Link badge that indicates the status of that content—just Option-click the link to see it in the Links panel. The New in CS6 workspace marks new CS6 menu items in blue, while CS5.5 items appear in purple. This is truly helpful if you skipped a version. A grab bar has been added to the top and bottom of panels to resize or move them—much easier than trying to click on the tiny icon in the bottom-right corner or the right edge of a panel.