Adobe MAX 2018: Creativity’s Golden Age
At today’s opening MAX keynote, the Adobe Creative Cloud team unveiled numerous new tools, features, and innovations. CEO Shantanu Narayen’s presentation stressed how Adobe is focusing on how creativity plays a major role in education, business, and social efforts. Narayen stressed that “everyone has a story to tell” as well as the importance of giving users the ability to create wherever and whenever they want and easily share their work, which has been a common theme through the years.
Adobe announced major updates to Creative Cloud applications and introduced Adobe Premiere Rush CC, a complete, simple-to-use video editing app for social media creators that simplifies video creation and sharing on platforms like YouTube and Instagram. It also previewed future iPad versions of Adobe Photoshop CC and Project Gemini, a drawing app, showing once again the commitment Adobe has to offer high-performance apps that work seamlessly across devices.
What’s New in InDesign
As in years past, the product demos showcased some amazing new creative features, especially for Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dimension. But for us, the new features announced for InDesign were just as exciting.
Technology for Publishing has been working with the prerelease version of the product and has found that the new features, as described below, will certainly have a big impact on your workflow, layout design options, and how you work in general with many of the functions you use on a regular basis in InDesign.
Here’s a more complete list of what you can expect from InDesign CC 2019:
Convert footnotes and endnotes
You now have the ability to convert footnotes to endnotes and visa versa. Just go to Type>Convert Footnote to Endnote to open this new dialog and choose the conversion you want to take place—footnote to endnote or endnote to footnote.
Visual font browsing
The Fonts panel has been updated to create a more visually interactive experience. The new features added include a filter to view only the recently added fonts, an option that lets you preview fonts applied to different sample text, the ability to change the font size while you’re previewing a font, and a Find More tab that lets you browse and add more fonts.
PDF Form enhancements
You are no longer limited to using Minion Pro in your interactive PDFs. You can now select different font families and font types for text field, list box, and combo box form fields. Any missing form field font alerts can be rectified from the Find Font dialog box. Missing fonts will also be flagged in the preflight panel.
Content-Aware Fit
When you go to place an image, InDesign can now evaluate that image along with the frame’s dimensions and aspect ratio and intelligently fit the best part of the image into the frame. This feature is also available to use on previously placed images in your document. Just click Content Aware Fit from the Control Panel or select it from the context menu.
Adjust Layout
This powerful new feature automatically adjusts the elements in your layout when the document’s page size, page margin, or bleed is changed. It resizes and realigns all of the frames, as well as their content.
Import PDF comments
Import PDF comments from one or more reviewers into InDesign and organize all the feedback using the Review panel.
Properties panel
InDesign CC 2019 added a new Properties panel. Get easy access to the specific controls needed for the task or workflow you are currently working in right when you need them. You’ll find the Properties panel available by default in the Essentials workspace or by selecting Window>Properties to open it.
Add footnotes in tables
Now it is possible to add footnotes to a table in InDesign. Footnotes appear at the bottom of the text frame, reference numbers are continued from the story text, footnotes imported from Word tables are retained, and the table footnotes will export to formats that support them.
Space between paragraphs of same style
Paragraph spacing just got a new option that is very exciting. You can now choose whether or not the spacing before and spacing after settings affect the space between paragraphs of the same style. An option in the Styles dialog lets you specify a value for the space between paragraphs having the same style, which will be used only when two consecutive paragraphs are the same paragraph style. When the paragraph style is different, the existing value for Space Before and/or Space After will be used.
Retain file name while exporting as PDF
The Export dialog box has a new check box that, when selected, will give the exported PDF the same name as the name of the document. When unchecked, the export file name will be the custom name previously entered.
Create Printing Instructions while packaging
While creating a package, you can choose Create Printing Instructions from the Summary tab in the Package dialog box to create a printing instructions file. When this option is selected, the Printing Instructions dialog box will open when you click Package.
Remember previous export format
InDesign will now remember the last export format selected for a document. This solves the problem for many users who end up exporting to the wrong format, and is especially helpful to those users exporting to PDF Print and Interactive, or EPUB Fixed and Reflowable. The document will retain the last export format when passed to another user or workstation as well.
Index panel enhancement
The display area for index entries has been increased, making it easier to find index entries, and a search field has been added with next and previous arrows for searching within the index entries.
Our soon to be released handbook, Using Adobe InDesign CC 2019, will give you all the information about the new features in a complete guide to using the application.
For InDesign tips and information regarding industry updates, check out our blog and sign up for our newsletters. Want to learn even more? Check out all our best-selling handbooks, apps and our e-book, Building Apps with Adobe Experience Manager Mobile, now available on Amazon.
Note: Information contained in this post is current at the time of posting. Visit the Technology for Publishing News & Events blog for the latest info on Adobe software releases and functionality.
Posted by: Monica Murphy
