Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One

With Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One, you'll quickly learn how to design professional layouts for print and digital publishing with this program. You get complete step-by-step instructions and hours of DVD-video demonstrations with Deke McClelland's unique and effective system. Learn techniques in the book, see how they're done in the video, and apply the knowledge to hands-on projects offered in every chapter.

Coauthor David Futato's Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One Top Ten New Features Roundup

David Futato is a full-time freelance designer and the design mastermind behind the One-on-One book series. Having worked in design and production in both publishing and advertising for the last fifteen years, he brings real-world experience to his projects—he's wrestled with nearly every kind of layout, file format, schedule, press issue, and client one can imagine. In addition to the One-on-One books, his credits include the interior book designs for the Animal and Digital Media series from O'Reilly Media. David holds a Bachelor of Science in writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

10) Spread-view rotation. If you have landscape pages in your document, this feature will save you a trip to the chiropractor. Just rotate the spread view from the Pages palette, and like magic, InDesign suddenly rights itself.

9) New Style option in dialogs. This may seem like something trivial, but the amount of time saved adds up quickly. In CS4, whenever you are asked to specify a style (say, for a nested style or an automatic number), you now have the option of creating a new style from within the dialog. No more backing out, creating the new style separately, then heading back to the original dialog box.

8) The Preflight palette. Quite possibly the biggest new feature in the bunch. The plethora of options tucked away inside the Preflight palette may well have designers pulling at their hair (or ignoring the palette entirely), but prepress folks and standards-sticklers will fall in love. Real-time preflighting as you work? Awesome. No more surprises when your files go to the vendor? Even better.

7) GREP nested styles. This is InDesign's most obtuse new feature, hands down. GREP? Regular expressions? Still, if your eyes haven't glazed over yet, they're probably popping. Users with an understanding of regular expressions will love the power and flexibility of this feature—automatically styling any URL, or phone number, or anything else that can be found with a regex search, regardless of where it appears in the paragraph.

6) Contact-sheet cascade placement. Sure to be the new best friend of catalog-makers, asset managers, heck, just about anyone with more than a handful of images to keep track of. Take a stack of images loaded on the Place cursor, and drag a box on the page. InDesign automatically sizes and distributes the images in contact sheet form in the box you just drew.

5) The tabbed-window interface. This is a controversial feature for sure, and a couple of OS X users are crying foul. Early on, I was one of them—I'm a Mac guy through and through, using Boot Camp to run Windows when necessary—but I became a tabbed-window convert. You now have the option of docking every document in a tabbed window. Click a tab to switch documents. Drag a tab to reassign priority. Just like I could never give up my tabbed web browsing, I'm hooked on the tabbed-window interface in CS4.

4) Place-gun constrained frames. Even though it may sound dangerous, in actuality it's the best new image placement feature. With an image loaded onto the place cursor, click and drag—InDesign automatically constrains the frame to the proportions of the image. What's more, it displays the scale percentage of the image on the fly while you drag.

3) The Links palette. Rebuilt, retooled, and revamped in CS4, the Links palette is no longer just a place to check for red question marks or yellow triangles. Split into two panes, the first is the traditional list you know and love (though now it's customizable), and the second gives you more information than you can imagine about the selected image. Best feature? You can see the effective PPI directly from within InDesign—something I'm thrilled to finally see.

2) Smart Guides. The Smart Guides are an amazing collection of... well, it's hard to say exactly what they are. How they work, on the other hand, is straightforward and yet magical—InDesign compares the object you're working on to those around it on the page, and snaps into place. The Smart Guides work for aligning, scaling, cropping, distributing—you name it, they've got it covered. And the Smart Measure cursor puts the most relevant dimensions right at the same point as your mouse, so no more looking back and forth between what you're doing and what the control palette dimensions say.

1) Cross-references. Sure, it's not flashy (or visually stunning) like Photoshop CS4's OpenGL navigation, or even InDesign's Smart Guides. And some people may never use the feature—rarely do you need cross-references in print ads or other single page documents. But as an author, a book designer, a layout artist—whatever hat I'm wearing at the moment—my bread and butter are books, and a book without cross-references is little more than a doorstop. I've been waiting, no clamoring, for this feature for years. No more entering five-hundred-plus figure references by hand! The cross-reference formats are fully customizable and work beautifully across book documents. Best of all, they automatically translate to links when exported to PDF.