New bits in CS6 part one

InDesign CS6 has arrived! The trial can be downloaded from here so there is no reason not to roll up your sleeves and have a good dig around to see what's new. This is not a comprehensive guide to whats what in this jazzy new edition of everyone's favourite piece of software. In fact its a very very quick look at a couple of things I noticed straight off the bat. So with expectations suitably muted lets step inside…



Its new
The first thing I did, after quickly glancing at the interface, was to create a new document. So it is here where I shall begin. And what better way to proceed that to directly compare CS5.5 to CS6!

There are a couple of subtle differences to the way the panels look, but the major difference is in the Intent drop down menu. Where before we had only Web and Print, we now have something called Digital Publishing. Which is kinda similar to the Web option. The main (only) difference is that now the Page Size drop down menu contains resolutions for various devices, iPad etc. instead of standard resolutions! Is that good? I am not sure, you could easily just still use Web and manually type in the resolutions anyway. Or use Digital Publishing and type in the standard resolutions. If there is something else it does I am yet to find it!


Also of note, the Master Text Frame is now the Primary Text Frame. Which I will come to in another post.


I want all the Badges
Next thing on this whistle stop tiny tour is the Link Badges. You can't miss these. They sit atop any frame which contains a link. Link Badges let you know the status of a link without having to open up the Links panel. If you Alt/Option+click on the badge it will open the Links panel and select the appropriate link for you. If you want to hide these go to View>Extras>Show/Hide Link Badge. But I don't know why you would want to do that. They are ace and deserve to be seen!

One last thing in this short post, the Toolbar seems to have been Lion-a-fied and stripped of the little bit of colour it had when mousing over the icons. Seems a bit pointless to me. I like a splash of colour in my applications.


That's it for now, I will try to cover more of the new content in InDesign CS6 as and when I can. For now the sofa and the TV is calling to me.