border=0 />“Efficiency” and “productivity” may not turn heads. But what about “fewer keystrokes to accomplish repetitive tasks” or “fewer nights in the office”? That’s what Adobe’s aiming for with the latest InDesign. </p> <p> Say you lay out a weekly newsletter with sidebars that always have the same paragraph styles, text wraps, and drop shadow settings. Make this combination of settings an Object Style and you can apply the entire combination at once to every future sidebar. You can also use the Object Style palette to create, delete, copy, and edit the styles. Those styles can include transparency, drop shadow and feather, text frame options, text wrap, fill and stroke colours, and stroke and corner effects. You can base an object style on another object style, so when you change the original, all related styles reflect the change. If you don’t want changes to the parent style to affect child styles, you can break the link between them. </p> <p> Small XML files that let you save, reuse, and share objects. You could, for example, save a highly formatted table as a snippet – just select the table (whether created in InDesign or imported) and either drag it to another location or export it. The resulting file will be small enough to email – no need to send the whole InDesign file or to delete extraneous material and save just the table page. When you place a snippet on an InDesign page, it appears in the same relative location as on its original page, with all the metadata (including thumbnails, fonts, and colour swatches) intact. </p> <p> The new InDesign lets you drag-&-drop text between paragraphs, frames, views, layout and Story Editor windows, and documents. You can even drag text from another application into an existing InDesign text frame. The program also automatically corrects text as you type. (You can turn off this new option). Adobe has refined the way it handles styles in imported Word and RTF documents. You can rename imported styles to avoid conflicts with InDesign style names, overwrite InDesign styles with Word/RTF styles, and map Word/RTF styles to existing InDesign styles. </p> <p> Usually, it’s best to have images, sidebars, and callouts near the point where they’re referenced in the main text. But as text flows change, it can be hard to keep track of those reference locations. Now you can anchor an object to a point within a text frame. If the point in the text frame moves, the anchored object goes along for the ride. </p> <p> <img src= Print

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