InDesign CS5

Hi Folks, I LOVE indesign and was it was pretty much second nature in CS4 but the new CS5 is doing my head in... the only reason being that when so scale things it uses the centre as the base point as opposed to the previous version where it anchored at the top left. I even have the top left square activated but when reducing the size of an object and its contents it centres it- this is sooo annoying and counter intuitive and is making work really annoying! I'm hoping there is just a weird hidden preference but i've asked many other designers an nobody seems to know how to fix it? Its painful when you want to quickly align objects and scale them accordingly? Please help anyone who knows what im on about! Many thanks Tom

me?

I just upgraded yesterday from CS2 to CS5 (Design Standard) so that's a big leap for me, although I've been using CS3 for years at work. I'm going to be reading up in the Help about what's new but I guess I'll have to look elsewhere to see what was new in CS4. I think over all there are tons of great new features but the main hurdle coming from CS3 is the interface changes.

The Panels work slightly different and can get annoying. You used to be able to click a collapsed panel and then click the panel's tab to close it. Now you can't do that, you have to click the little right-pointing arrows, EXCEPT in Photoshop which works as it did before. I also don't get why all panel name are now uppercase letters which make them harder to read and take up more space.

I haven't warmed up to the "application bar" on the CS apps either. They don't seem to be consistent across the apps and they waste a lot of space in the middle. If they were consolidated more into the interface I would use them.

Not so much excited with CS5 in comparison with IDCS4 as it had something entirely new i.e. Live Preflight.

In case anybody else hadn't heard about this: http://indesignsecrets.com/michael-ninness-answers-indesign-cs5-critics.php

It's an interesting read, although I think it might say more about flaws in the process Adobe used to develop CS5 than anything else. Nonetheless, I do wish Adobe were more transparent about how these decisions get made, what work is being done on the next CS, etc. A little transparency would go a long way to assuaging the feeling that InDesign is turning into Quark.

The thing that I thought was interesting was the link offered as an example of why interactive PDFs are a good thing to have spent development time on: http://www.pdfpictures.com/ebrochures.html. After looking at a few of them I'm wondering if this is all a big April Fools joke or something. They're PDFs (and massive PDFs at that) with forward/back buttons and images and videos, as far as I can tell. In other words, they're the sort of things that people hoped had died off about a decade ago in favour of good, accessible, flexible web sites. Really, Adobe?

Happy to meet the Gurus/Masters here.

I know that nothing will change, but I am so angry that I have to write this post. I am using CS3 (and I think I will never replace it), and I have recently made a classical philologist's book. Not a magazine, a newspaper etc., just 450 pages of simple text. I said to myself: there are no pictures and nothing  complicated, I will do it in no time.

So: 1. there were endnotes, ID could not handle them. And it was the easier situation, because there could have been endnotes and footnotes -- now I would like to see what would ID say to that?

2. There were two footnotes in a table. ID could not handle that. wow.

3. There was a long citation from another text with two footnotes, originally marked by stars. These of course do not count into the book's footnotes. ID imported them, and numbered them. The numbers should have gone as: 1, 2, 3, *, **, 4, 5, 6 etc.instead of it they went as: 1, 2, 3, *4, **5, 6, 7 etc. I could not make ID stop numbering at 3 and then restart numbering at four after the two footnotes with stars. Is it really such a big problem to allow us to make a jump in the footnote numbers?

And it was only a book with nothing but plain text. There were other hair-rising problems, but I could handle them at the end. ID should learn from Latex a lot.

Péter Jutai

Hungary

Bob, I'm an ebook designer. Regarding multimedia -- can you tell me whether InDesign CS5 can export placed .swf files within InDesign and still export to a .swf file for the flipping page effect?

Sage

By the way, here's the What's New section of InDesign CS5 Help.

I shoud like to know if it is now possible in InDesign CS5 to create a simple flash banner to place directly in a website?

Or is it necessary to do the finishing and ad actionscripting in Flash?

:-) Nina Storm