Datasheet

Part I ✦ Welcome to InDesign

What makes InDesign special

The release of PageMaker in 1986 launched the desktop publishing revolution, and in the

following 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 sig-

nificant 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

and Ventura Publisher, or in PageMaker):

✦ Multiline composer, which lets InDesign adjust the spacing and hyphenation over

several lines of text at once — rather than the typical one-line-in-isolation of other

programs —to achieve the best possible spacing and hyphenation. (See Chapter 18.)

✦ Optical margin alignment, which actually moves some characters past the margin

of your columns to create the optical illusion that all the characters line up. This

works because some characters’ shapes fool the eye into thinking they begin before

or after where they really do, so although technically aligned, they appear not to be.

Optical margin alignment fixes that. (See Chapter 18.)

✦ Optical kerning, which adjusts the spacing between characters based on their

shapes, for the most natural look possible without resorting to hand-tuning their

spacing. (See Chapter 18.)

✦ A menu for inserting special characters, so you no longer have to remember

codes or use separate programs like the Mac’s Key Caps 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 15.)

✦ Glyph scaling, which 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 kern-

ing, which adjust the spacing between characters to make them fit better on a line.

(See Chapter 18.)

✦ Custom strokes for characters, which let you change the look of characters by

making their outlines thicker or thinner. You can also give the part of the characters

inside the outlines a different color, to create an outline effect. (Normally, the part

inside the stroke is the same color as the stroke, so the reader sees a normal, solid

character.) (See Chapter 18.)

✦ EPS display, so you can now 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 22.)

✦ Illustrator and Photoshop file import, so you can place these graphics files

directly in your layout. (See Chapter 23.)

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