Thursday, May 25, 2006, 02:50 pm

Four Adobe InDesign CS3 features revealed

By Prince McLean

In a highly unorthodox moved by the traditionally tight-lipped company, Adobe Systems has followed up its official leak of details on Apollo with some gems on the next major release of InDesign.

In a private briefing with InDesignSecrets, the software company revealed four features planned for the next major release of the page layout application, which will ship in the second quarter of 2007 as part of Adobe Creative Suite 3.0.

The move comes just days after rival Quark announced a major overhaul to its own desktop publishing and page layout software, QuarkXPress 7.0. Although Quark called a last minute audible and released the software for Macs as a PowerPC native application instead of a Universal Binary, the company promised to release a patch that would deliver native Intel support by August.

Similarly, InDesign CS3 will also be a Universal Binary when it's released. The application is already up and running as a Universal Binary, Adobe revealed in demonstrations on a MacBook Pro.

One of the new features of the application, dubbed "Object Effects," will allow designers to apply Photoshop-like effects such as bevel, emboss and inner shadow, to any InDesign object including text. Meanwhile, another feature will allow transparency effects to be applied to an object’s fill, stroke, or contents on an individual basis.

InDesign CS3 will also offer designers more control over the way they select and work with multiple files.

"You will be able to select more than one graphic or text file in the Place dialog box, and when you click OK, you’ll see a small thumbnail of each image next to the Place cursor," InDesignSecrets said in its report. "You can then quickly place each image or text file into a frame with a 'click, click, click.' Even better, you can cycle through the images “loaded” in the Place cursor with the arrow keys before clicking."

During the briefing, Adobe representatives said the adoption rate of InDesign CS2 has been extremely strong, especially in the magazine market.