Adobe announced the upcoming release of InDesign 2.0 at Seybold San Francisco last month. The new version, Adobe’s third in nearly two years, will be available in the first quarter of 2002 to customers in the United States and Canada for an estimated price of $699. There will be a 90-day upgrade offer for $99, after which time the upgrade will cost $149.

With Adobe InDesign 2.0’s enhanced support for XML content, XML tags can be mapped to typographic styles.
Photos courtesy of Adobe

Adobe’s main concern in creating the new version was removing barriers in the workflow, the company said. InDesign 2.0 is based on publishing for the future, setting new standards that raise the bar on print publishing and superior innovation, according to Maria Yap, senior product manager for InDesign.

Newspapers are increasingly being published to multiple devices — to the Internet, Palm devices and cell phones. The latest version of InDesign centers on Adobe’s vision for network publishing — “making visually rich, personalized content available anytime, anywhere and on any device.” It also focuses on an integrated workflow.

New to InDesign 2.0 is the eXtensible Meta Platform, or XMP. XMP enables integrators and users to enhance metadata inside of application files. With the increase in remote publishing comes an increased demand for more complex solutions. On remote terminals, the metadata enclosed inside application files gives documents context outside of a particular system. Users can embed metadata tags, or labels, that accompany a document and describe its content, in their InDesign documents that make them easier to track, manage and retrieve.

“The benefit to the end user is the significant potential for workflow automation using XMP technology,” said Gray Knowlton, product marketing manager for Adobe. Also, digital rights can be directly embedded into PDF archives so that newspapers can control what content can be downloaded.

InDesign 2.0 allows direct export as Acrobat 4.0 and 5.0 PDF files, tighter integration with Illustrator and Photoshop, including an Adobe common user interface, native file import and dynamic publishing with GoLive through eXtensible Markup Language. InDesign 2.0 offers native Mac OS X support and integration with Adobe Studio, a new feature announced at Seybold that facilitates project collaboration.

All of the new features in the system were created based on technology already inherent to Adobe’s other products to facilitate tighter integration. Therefore, a user can move graphics from product to product while retaining exact elements, such as color and fonts.

Of benefit to newspaper users is enhanced support for XML content. InDesign 2.0 templates can be set up with a user’s chosen schema and/or the schemas set in the software. XML tags can be mapped to typographic styles. With this feature, well-formed XML content can be automatically formatted by importing it into InDesign templates.

The latest version also boasts increased speed. Text can be placed on a page 17 times faster that with version 1.5, according to Adobe, while images can be placed nine times faster.

Adobe said it was in tune with user’s requests when creating InDesign 2.0. Among the top requested features for the new version was support for creating tables on pages. The new Tables feature of InDesign 2.0 gives users the capability to turn tab-delimited text from Microsoft Word, Excel and databases into a table. Users can link table frames and Autoflow tables and include automatic color striping within the different rows of a table.

“This is pretty exciting because it’s something that a lot of people have wanted in page layout for a long time and you could only get tables with a combination of different extensions or plug-ins. Everybody really wanted it more native to the application so it would feel more integrated,” Yap said. Tables created with InDesign can flow from column to column on a newspaper page.

“What’s really unique about the tables in InDesign is that [they] can actually break across frames,” Yap added.

InDesign prides itself on superior typography. New typography features a hyphenation penalty slider, an insert glyph palette and robust OpenType support and users can define preferences, such as “better breaks” or “less hyphenation.”

Newspapers also have the capability to make more changes on deadline with InDesign 2.0. For example, some elements of a Photoshop image could be blended with other elements in InDesign, without requiring the user to go back into Photoshop.

Common technologies throughout workflow and between Adobe products include the Adobe Color Engine, Adobe Graphics Model, CoolType and Asset Management Infrastructure.

Several newspaper publishing solutions providers have recently adopted Adobe InDesign and InCopy. The San Francisco Examiner, a Harris Publishing customer, deployed InDesign and InCopy as part of its Jazbox database publishing system, to write and edit stories. Digital Technology International adopted InDesign and InCopy and currently has 18 customers at various stages of implementation with DTI’s system, including the Savannah (Ga.) Morning News, the Kansas City (Mo.) Star and the London Daily Telegraph.

The Miami Herald, a Knight Ridder newspaper, is using InDesign as part of a beta agreement with net-linx Publishing Solutions, through which the newspaper has the option of using InDesign for pagination with net-linx’s Insiight editorial system. Currently, however, only the high-end graphics users at the paper are operating InDesign, while final laydown and production are still handled with QuarkXPress.

Like many newspapers, the Miami Herald is in the process of moving to a PDF workflow.

“With InDesign, you can handle PDF a lot better,” said Jason Zappe, systems editor for the Miami Herald.

In August, Mexican weekly news magazine, Cambio, switched to Adobe InDesign and InCopy for production as well.

On Sept. 7, Quark announced the availability of QuarkXPress 5.0 beta versions. QuarkXPress 5.0, like InDesign, includes a new Tables feature. It also includes a Layers feature, which Quark claims will save users time and money with a revised and more efficient print user interface, enhanced PDF support, contextual menus and improved color management. Version 5.0 also boasts enhanced Web features.