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What InDesign Can Do for You
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What Makes InDesign Special
T
he release of PageMaker in 1986 launched the desktop-publishing revolution, and in the follow-
ing years, PageMaker and its competitors added tons of cool features. It may be hard to imagine
that there’s anything new to add to this publishing toolkit.
Well, InDesign’s creators have managed to add a few new features. Following are the significant
additions to the desktop-publishing toolkit, courtesy of InDesign (note that this list doesn’t include
enhanced versions of features found in competitors such as QuarkXPress or in PageMaker):
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Paragraph composer: This lets InDesign adjust the spacing and hyphenation over an
entire paragraph at once — rather than, as typical of other programs, one line at a time —
to achieve the best possible spacing and hyphenation. (See Chapter 18.)
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Optical margin alignment: This actually moves some characters past the margin of your
columns to create the optical illusion that all the characters line up. It works because
some characters’ shapes fool the eye into thinking they begin before or after where they
really do, so although they’re technically aligned, they appear not to be. Optical margin
alignment fixes that. (See Chapter 19.)
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Optical kerning: This adjusts the spacing between characters based on their shapes,
which provides for the most natural look possible without resorting to hand-tuning their
spacing. (See Chapter 17.)
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A menu for inserting special characters: This makes it so you no longer have to remember
codes or use separate programs like the Mac’s Character Palette or the Windows
Character Map to add special symbols like bullets (•) and section indicators (§). Your
word processor has likely had this feature for a few years, but this is a first in desktop pub-
lishing. (See Chapter 21.)
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Glyph scaling: This lets InDesign stretch or compress characters to make them fit better on
a line. (A
glyph is a character.) This works in addition to tracking and kerning, which
adjust the spacing between characters to make them fit better on a line. (See Chapter 17.)
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Custom strokes for characters: This lets you change the look of characters by making
their outlines thicker or thinner. You can also give the part of the characters inside the out-
lines a different color to create an outline effect. (Typically, the part inside the stroke is the
same color as the stroke, so the reader sees a normal, solid character.) (See Chapter 12.)
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EPS display: This feature lets you see the detailed contents of an EPS file rather than rely
on a poor-quality preview image or, worse, see an X or gray box in place of the image.
(See Chapter 26.)
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Illustrator and Photoshop file import: This lets you place these graphics files directly in
your layout. (See Chapter 26.)
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Multiple views of the document: This lets you have several windows open for the same
document, enabling you to see different sections at the same time. (See Chapter 3.)
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