InDesign CS 2 is set to push some plug-in builders either out of business or force them to think their line of products all over again. The new version offers support for object styles, has better integration with InCopy CS 2 and is a better user experience in general. Desktop publishers will like what Adobe did to the program in terms of long-document support and much more.

InDesign CS 2’s most obvious improvement is Object Styles. Object Styles are the same as Paragraph and Character Styles, but applied to objects like frames, photographs and drawings. For example, creating different frames with the same text wrapping and the same kind of drop shadow now involves setting up such a frame once, then clicking the new style button the Object Styles palette and choosing a name for the new style.

All other frames will have the same features. Working with these styles is a huge time saver, of course, but what strikes me as odd is that some characteristics that you want to apply to multiple frames, apparently are not regarded as a styling feature. Scaling factors, for example, cannot be part of an object style.

For those “transformations”, InDesign CS 2 has another new trick up its sleeve: Transform Again. The Transform Again context menu item appears as soon as you have applied one transformation to your object. This item is a submenu with a number of options that enable you to choose to apply again only the last transformation or the entire last sequence of transformations.

A minor detail, but one that shows how far Adobe has gone to improve the user experience, is the ability to use a scroll wheel to zoom in or out of a document. Very handy, indeed!

The Bridge, Again

More akin to seriously improve your workflow, is InDesign’s integration with the Bridge. From the Bridge, you can drag an image into the InDesign document, and the image will appear where you dropped it. This is still more or less simple drag-and-drop functionality, but InDesign CS 2 has more to offer. Let’s say you want to save a text snippet or a frame with some text and an image for later use. 

How would you have saved this in previous versions? Probably by copying the lot to a new document and saving this document to disk. With the Bridge, there’s no need to go through all that trouble. Simply select everything you want to save as a snippet and drag it to the Bridge. There it will appear as a snippet; you can give it a name so that it’s easily recognized later on.

Later on, you can simply drag the snippet back into InDesign, in the same document, or another document.

Photoshop: Visible or not?

InDesign CS 2 allows you to control the visibility of layers in Photoshop and PDF files on import or afterwards. Photoshop layer comps can be hidden as well. The process couldn’t be simpler: you call up the context menu by right-clicking or control-clicking, and select the Object Layer Options item.

To enable you to see what you’re doing, there’s a Preview feature. This preview shows you which layyers you’re hiding right in the InDesign document. If you want to make sure your settings will stick, even when updating object links, you can check that too.