Adobe Creative Suite:
Bundle Up for Success

BY EDEN MAXWELL

Editorial

President’s PDA

Computer
Connections

Web Design Part 4

Why Apple Can’t
Afford to Ignore
the Gaming Industry

Adobe Creative
Suite

Tutorials:
Know Your App

PDF2Office v1.0

Qaptain Qwerty’s
Qorner

Photo Page

From My Keyboard

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ADOBE INDESIGN CS:
FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

With a revamped interface, unparalleled text control, and a variety of improvements, there is no doubt that InDesign CS is the publishing app of choice for professional designers. To support the shift in the marketplace, Total Training has released a tutorial for simplifying the migration from QuarkXpress to InDesign (see Tutorials: Know Your App). InDesign CS introduces new tools such as: the table editor, Photoshop-level transparency, and precise typographic control, plus, enhancements to many already introduced in InDesign 2.0.

InDesign CS features a Photoshop-like interface users will find in all the CS Suite apps – except Acrobat 6.0. Clicking on any of the three major palettes on the right forces them to neatly retreat into the edge of the screen.

Of course, InDesign is a remarkable print (and web) layout tool. But it is much more. InDesign represents a new form of freedom in publishing for anyone dedicated to learning the program. I can, for example, create a sample layout of the book I’m currently completing, and show the publisher how I feel the book would look it’s best. If I can influence the final design, I have made a further contribution to my own success. The possibilities in the self-publishing realm are enormous as well.

Nested Styles
If you’ve ever spent time applying formatting-specific overrides to paragraph styles, you know how time consuming it is. Even with Character Styles helping to speed the process, it takes time to apply an option, highlight and individually style drop caps, inline heads, specific text in table entries, and so forth. InDesign CS introduces nested styles, an innovation that takes the pain out of complicated text formatting. You can now nest one or more character styles into a paragraph style and apply both at one time.

To set up nested styles, do the following: define the character styles, choose New Paragraph Style from the Paragraph Styles palette menu, click the Drop Caps & Nested Styles options; click New Nested Style to display the choices, select a character style and set options for how it is to be applied in a paragraph. You can choose to apply the nested style up to or through sentences, words, characters, digits, letters, or a wide variety of special characters, such as: an em space, a tab mark, or a forced line break. You can also specify the number of sentences, words, characters, digits, or letters to which the character style is applied. Finally, you can embed more than one character style in a paragraph style to control the appearance of different elements of a paragraph.

The focus of this release is productivity, and it shows in every aspect of the program. The innovative Separations Preview and Flattener Preview palettes facilitate checking separations and transparency-flattener settings onscreen to help prevent costly problems on press.

Other new features, such as document presets and the Info palette, streamline layout tasks. Built-in support for DTD’s (Document Type Definitions) enables you to validate structured templates (into which you can dynamically flow XML files), and to more confidently tag and verify content for reuse. Plus, overall performance has taken another leap forward. Zooming, navigating with the grabber hand, importing PSD files, and outputting print and PDF files are all significantly faster.

Story Editor
Designed to function like a word processor within InDesign CS, the Story Editor is an efficient, new way to edit stories that run across several text frames or multiple pages. By opening a story in the Story Editor, you can add, edit, or delete text as quickly as you can type. Changes appear in the layout as you go. Viewing and applying paragraph and character styles, XML tags, and text formatting are fast and easy.

The Story Editor is customizable and delivers highly productive text-editing tools. Story Editor Display preferences include: font, font size, font color, line spacing, and background color. The text cursor can be set to a standard, barbell, thick, or block shape, and blinking can be turned on or off. An anti-aliasing option gives you control over the onscreen appearance of text. A choice of themes enables the Story Editor to mimic the look of ink on paper, amber monochrome, classic system, or terminal with a single setting.

If you have the entire Creative Suite, you have the Version Cue software (see end of article) that permits accessing (and controlling access) to a set of shared files. If you’re part of a small, creative team where simultaneous access to InDesign CS documents is needed, consider adding Adobe InCopy CS software ($259) to your InDesign CS toolkit.

Adobe InCopy CS software is a professional writing and editing program. It integrates tightly with Adobe InDesign CS to deliver a complete solution for collaborative, editorial workflow. It includes editorial, workflow- management technology enabling designers and editors to work simultaneously on the same InDesign CS document. InCopy CS gives editors 100% accurate information about line breaks and up-to-the-minute visual feedback about page design. This support for parallel workflows reduces the number of review and revision cycles, and, therefore, streamlines getting publications to market. It also puts copy-fitting control back in the hands of the editors who require more control over the integrity of their editorial content.

Beyond Paper
In this digital age, InDesign goes way beyond standard print. Adobe has made certain that InDesign CS meets most cross-media publishing needs, including Acrobat PDF’s, eBooks, and the Web.

InDesign 2.0 included an export command to HTML, which saved out your document’s pages as HTML along with converting images to Web-friendly formats. With InDesign CS, Adobe tossed this handy feature to focus on tighter integration with GoLive CS (most welcome if you’re a GoLive user and disappointing if you are not).

InDesign’s new Package for GoLive command delivers a new, more visually and creatively oriented way to repurpose print assets for the Web. Using a special viewer that displays the pages precisely as you laid them out in InDesign, you drag and drop content into your Web layout. It enables you to stay focused on the look of the Web pages while GoLive CS handles image conversion tasks using its Smart Objects technology (enabling image cropping and smart re-rendering if you resize images). GoLive CS automatically generates a cascading style sheet (CSS) from the InDesign text styles, or maps the InDesign styles to a CSS on your site. GoLive also converts fancy type settings, such as ligatures, which can’t be displayed in live text online.

InDesign: APB
One oversight committed by Adobe with InDesign is not being able to save InDesign CS files down to version 2.0. It promises to implement this feature in a future version. Another is the fact that, unless you have a two monitors setup or a nifty widescreen tableau, the interface is still problematic because there are more palettes than you’ll find at a learn how to paint workshop in Santa Cruz. You can use the workspace manager to save collections of palettes, or open and close them, but it’s tedious. As a workable alternative that Adobe does include is the Control palette. Instead of switching among the Character, Paragraph, Transform, Stroke, and Table palettes to style text, edit objects, and fine-tune tables, you can use the Control palette, which centralizes these options. There are also a few others for creating columns and fitting content to frames (in one location).

Since the Control palette is context-sensitive, the options available depend on the object selected on the InDesign CS page. For example: when the type tool is inserted in a text frame, text-formatting options appear, when an image or InDesign CS object is selected, transform, stroke, and other options are available, and when one or more table cells, rows, or columns are selected, table-specific options appear. The Control palette can float over the page, or dock to the top or bottom of the window, depending on your preference.

Despite a few minor flaws, InDesign will let you do it your way!

ACROBAT 6.0 PROFESSIONAL:
DISTRIBUTE, REVIEW, ARCHIVE

This app in the CS lineup retains its legacy version number and it is out of the loop where Version Cue is concerned.

Whereas Acrobat 6.0 Standard is aimed primarily for use by businesses, Acrobat 6.0 Professional includes significant output and preview enhancements, making it ideal for graphic artists and prepress folk. To a lesser degree, it also supports its secondary market of engineers and architects.

Acrobat 6.0 Professional is optimized for those needing to exchange and review files created with InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and other graphics applications. Creative professionals (you know who you are) can streamline the document review process while ensuring accuracy and deliver reliable, production-ready Adobe PDF files for final output to service providers and printers.

Designers, print production artists, and printers will all benefit from the new features in Acrobat 6.0 Professional. Enhanced review and markup, as well as the new review tracker feature, facilitate streamlining and managing document review cycles. Users can create reliable print output with new validation and preflighting tools, including checking for, and outputing, PDF/X format compliant files (PDF/X files are a subset of the PDF format that has been optimized for high end printing).

Acrobat 6.0 Professional Edition: The new Layers window is like layers in Photoshop or Illustrator. By clicking on the eye icon, you reveal or hide a layer. This feature is great for sending a client a PDF with various versions of artwork for approval.

Setting Acrobat’s rules for preflighting a print job can seem daunting. Fortunately, many service bureaus will provide the necessary rules and specifications by email or on their websites. In addition, the ability to preview and print color separations and transparency flattening provides a cost-effective and powerful way to see how the document will look when printed.

Another useful output feature is the PDF Optimizer tool. It lets you reduce a file size quickly by resampling graphics, adjusting font-subsetting specs, and removing unnecessary content (such as JavaScripts, external links, and thumbnails). It can also optimize files for faster Web display. Since Acrobat 6.0 uses PDF 1.5 (the latest specification from Adobe that now supports Layers), it might be better to save PDF files in Acrobat 5.0 format to ensure compatibility with older systems until the new format is more widely used.

Acrobat 6.0 Professional can output color separations. It can also take direct control of PostScript output devices to add features, including registration and bleed marks, and color bars. Version 6.0’s new measuring tools, grids, and guidelines give you precision control over page geometry. You can zoom in to 6,400 percent to examine minute attributes, such as precise alignments. Acrobat’s new Loupe Tool opens a resizable window that magnifies the area of the document that is underneath moveable loupe (very handy).

In this release there aren’t too many enhancements for engineers and architects. Those using the Windows-only Microsoft Visio and Autodesk’s AutoCAD do get one-button PDF creation with layer preservation. Mac users with the Standard Edition can view and comment on these files with layers intact.

With all the impressive print support in this release, prepress professionals will make Acrobat Professional 6.0 the de facto version in no time.

GOLIVE CS: LIVELIER THAN EVER

Back in 1998, GoLive from CyberStudio was my first introduction to creating web content without having to know HTML code. GoLive had a neat, drag-and-drop, layout grid that built upon the WYSIWYG metaphor used in page layout apps for print. Images and text were positioned on the grid and GoLive wrote the code in the background. This was a dream come true. Of course, GoLive wrote code not of this earth, which made tweaking HTML a job for an alien web master. But, that was then.

Fast forward.

Adobe acquired GoLive in 1990, kept the grid, and has been improving it with each release. Adobe has further refined Smart Objects, a feature that allows working with native Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat format files directly within the GoLive environment. Every time a site is opened or refreshed, GoLive CS checks for changes in the source files of its Smart Objects. If a Smart Object has been modified in another application, GoLive CS updates the optimized versions of the files used in the site. Reminder! You can also save time by cropping Smart Objects within the Layout window. As with all Smart Object operations, these crops exist only in the GoLive CS version of the file.

Users will be pleased to find that site planning and diagramming has also been improved.

Adobe GoLive is now replete with advanced tools for Web masters and features for graphic designers who depend on palette-driven WYSIWYG tools. It offers better integration with other Adobe products, productivity improvements, a revised interface, and refined coding tools. The app is comparable to Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 in many ways, but lacks that app’s robust CSS support.

Interface Me
With its familiar, customizable, Adobe user interface, powerful design, and programming tools, GoLive CS can build eye-catching sites that are fully compliant with the latest industry standards. At the same time, you are free to work in any of five environments, including the drag-and-drop layout grid previously mentioned, a full-featured source code editor, a visual Cascading Style Sheets editor, and multiple split views.

Adobe revamped the overall look of the interface to pretty much match the layout found in the other apps of the CS suite. The Objects palette, for example, now has a default toolbar display that emulates Photoshop’s Tool palette. To make more onscreen room, palettes can retract to the right side of the display and then expand for action with a single click.

Despite integrated, interface conformity with the other apps, the enormous set of tools in GoLive can lead to some confusion at first. There are nearly 30 floating palettes, not including the toolbar, Objects palette, or Site window. GoLive CS was prone to crashes, especially when running Panther. As of this writing, Adobe released 7.0.2r1, a much needed bug fix only update.

As users of Dreamweaver MX 2004 know, Dreamweaver Extensions (bits of code that implement a function) help expand the scope of the site creation process. GoLive CS also offers extensions through its Software Development Kits (SDK). With extensions, users can add new features, create custom objects, and automate complex actions. You can create your own extensions with HTML and JavaScript, or download them from Adobe’s Studio Exchange, where there is a large library of extensions by other users and developers. An updated Extension Builder provides a jump-start for creating new extensions within GoLive with the new GoLive interface. An updated Dialog Editor offers control over the visual appearance of dialogs.

GoLive includes many other additions, including a Zoom tool for pixel-to-pixel accuracy when layers and page content is placed into a document.

Works Well with Others
If you’re not already heavily invested in another web authoring program, it’s important to consider the fact that GoLive CS is now even better integrated with the rest of the Suite.

Users of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign will find GoLive’s exclusive tool sets real time-savers. No other Web app offers anything as “intelligent” as Smart Objects. An InDesign document can be automatically repurposed for the Web by exporting a Package for GoLive that includes all of the InDesign document’s text and images. After importing the package file to GoLive, a floating window containing a thumbnail of the InDesign document is used to add graphics and text to your GoLive document.

GoLive CS includes many new PDF tools. For example, the PDF Smart Object tool generates Web graphics of a PDF file. You can add comments and Web links to PDF files directly within the app.

Whether you feel at home hand-coding your pages, or like switching between layout and source code modes, code completion will certainly help you along the way. As you begin to type a tag, property, or other valid bit of code, GoLive CS searches for appropriate choices to complete the statement and offers them in a popup menu beside the text you're typing. (This is a feature Dreamweaver has had for some time.) Unfortunately, GoLive's code-completion feature does not present available CSS classes in your working document as in Dreamweaver. Anyone who works with code will miss not having this code completion aide in GoLive.

GoLive’s ability to generate compact code while keeping it “tweakable” is greatly improved. (This is something you could not do in earlier versions.) Code newbies will find it includes ready-to-go snippets of code to get you up and running. With numerous code-related enhancements, this is a formidable coding tool as well as a flexible Web layout application.

GoLive CS offers more CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) support and a full-featured CSS editor now simplifies style creation into a single palette.

Standard Issues
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) rely on style sheets to format the appearance of HTML on the Web page. It is becoming passé to use inelegant, invisible, spacer gifs and tables to keep content on the web page aligned. The latest Web browsers support CSS, which makes designing sites with CSS a natural evolution. Although GoLive’s CSS tools are not honed, the program has improved its CSS implementation. The CSS editor now simplifies style creation into a single palette. You use an integrated CSS Editor with powerful options and a visual preview. You can add new classes, elements, IDs, and store styles in an external or page-specific file. You can set text, font, box, background, and border properties, and then view the code snippet that’s been created. As you build a style, the CSS Editor instantly updates its visual preview, giving you real time feedback as you design. While you’re designing a Web page, you can preview a given CSS style applied to text near the text-insertion point. Hovering the mouse over a style’s check box in either the new drop-down CSS button on the toolbar or the revamped CSS palette shows how that style would format selected or adjacent text.

Although GoLive’s support for CSS is greatly improved, creating complex CSS design remains a challenge. Gone is the app’s dynamic content technology that let you create database-integrated sites (Dreamweaver MX 2004 still offers this feature). One the upside, GoLive can’t be beat when it comes to building complex forms (used on mostly database driven sites).

But, despite its faults, GoLive is a major contender and Adobe’s developers are sure to keep massaging this powerful app for a shot at the title.

VERSION CUE:
TRACKING THE CREATIVE SPIRIT

Finding files can be half the battle to creating content. A designer entering a project midway can spend hours of precious design time orienting to file-naming conventions, directory hierarchies, and locating volumes where files have been stored. There is also the time lost making sure a version is the most current.

For years, Adobe has experimented with different approaches to tracking the evolution of a file. Enter Version Cue, the file version manager built into the Adobe Creative Suite. It manages files using familiar Adobe tools. It saves all files to a workspace accessible from Photoshop CS, Illustrator CS, InDesign CS, and GoLive CS.

There are two ways access a file that has been saved to the Version Cue workspace. One is to choose File > Open and click on the My Projects button. The My Projects Browse window appears displaying thumbnail previews of available project files, complete pop-up information, such as the name of the last person to work on it, and version comments describing work history. The other method is to click over to the Search tab and use information such as, version comments, author, keyword, and date. Version Cue ensures that all external applications get the latest version of each file asset (image, drawing, or layout).

Version Cue is a work in progress, a system under construction, and yes, there are many features it currently lacks. But, as with all systems, the issue always comes down to the question, will people use the system as it was designed? If design does not follow function, then all that is left is the ideal without implementation in the real world. Version Cue is a promising technology that will improve over time as user feedback tailors new and necessary improvements. Acrobat 6.0 Professional does not yet support Version Cue.

Install tip: Prior to installing the Version Cue software, you may have to temporarily disable OS X’s firewall. Remember! Turn the firewall back on!

With the introduction of Version Cue 1.0, Adobe has made a significant inroad for tracking your assets. While it is currently far from perfect, it does represent a light at the end of the tunnel.

About the author: Eden Maxwell is a fine artist and published book author. He has contributed to many publications, including Popular Science, Art Calendar Magazine, Drachen Foundation Journal, Popular Mechanics, MacStreet Journal Online, Omni, MacUser, MacDigest, and Computer Gaming World. His art has been exhibited on both the West and East Coasts and his work has appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Eden is currently writing a book for artists to be published in 2004. Visit Eden’s Atelier and Gallery website. You may also reach him via .