Adobe InDesign Creative Suite 5.5: What's new
If you can get past the pricing issues, InDesign's creative tools are innovative. Digital Publishing Suite offers many interactive elements, including hyperlinks, slideshows, 360 viewers, audio, panoramas, video, pan-and-zoom of images and a Web View for placing live content such as Twitter and RSS feeds.
The Overlay Creator is now an Extension panel rather than a separate application. This is a great timesaver. The toolset isn't going to make you a rival of professional app developers, but it does most of what's needed on a regular basis.
The Folio Producer panel replaces the Content Bundler, allowing you to flatplan articles to create a publication. We're not enrolled in Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite programme, so were unable to test how smoothly this works.
InDesign CS5.5's ePub creation toolset simplifies turning a layout into an e-book. The new Articles panel allows you to stack a list of text boxes and images to create the simple chain-format of ePub. An option in the Paragraph Styles dialog box then lets you map different styles on to paragraph and header styles, so your titles remain clear and bold. You can also embed video for use on tablets that support it.
Setting up Paragraph Styles is initially the most time-consuming task, but you're then ready to start creating publications. The grind comes if your text is largely in one series of connected text boxes, as to break these up with images you need to use InDesign's fiddly Anchors system. A simple way to connect existing images with parts of the text without affecting the print layout would be most welcome.
Adobe Indesign CS 5.5 serial number