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VERDICT: New effects enable richer design results while a host of other improvements boost productivity.

By combining photos from Photoshop and illustrations from Illustrator with its own text, layout, formatting and output strengths, InDesign CS3 stands out as the central application in Adobe’s vision of the modern publishing workflow. It also stands out because it is the only one of the three main CS3 design applications that faces any serious competition.
In particular, to win the coveted high-end publishing crown from QuarkXPress, InDesign has to tackle head-on the one area in which Quark has always excelled – productivity. The working environment is crucial here and the latest InDesign benefits from the new CS3 shared interface based on customisable workspaces built on floatable palettes stacked neatly in collapsible docker windows to either side of the screen. For the other CS3 applications this revolutionizes working life but, as InDesign CS2 already boasted a similar system, here the benefits are less radical.
However there are plenty of other enhancements that do boost productivity enormously: more control is now available via the main context-sensitive Control bar; the Pages palette now shows thumbnails of all pages and you can drag within it to scroll and right-click to call up context-sensitive commands; double-clicking on an image frame automatically shifts from the Select to Direct Select tool so that you can edit its content; frame fitting can now be set up in advance and as part of an object style; and the Quick Apply dialog now lists scripts as well as commands and offers filtering shortcuts.

InDesign CS3 offers numerous productivity enhancements

The most impressive efficiency boost is completely new and will undoubtedly save hours of unnecessary effort. You can now load multiple files for placing simply by dragging and dropping from the bundled version of Bridge CS3. Each file is represented at the cursor by a preview thumbnail which you can quickly cycle through to place them in the order that you want. Multiple import naturally proves most useful when working with images but it also works with text files - and now you can also place InDesign’s own INDD files too. This new support for embedding native files is particularly significant as it means that multiple users can collaborate on a single layout. However, unlike QuarkXPress 7’s composition zones, such collaboration can’t be arranged on-the-fly and is limited to single page, rectangular areas.
As a professional publishing package, InDesign needs to be able to deal with any project that is thrown at it, and one of the main focuses of this latest release is better handling of more advanced publications. A good example is the ability to create automatically bulleted and numbered list sequences now with support for prefixes, style-based hierarchies and non-contiguous control – powerful but complex. There’s also new support for text variables which proves most valuable when linked to styles making it possible to set up running headers and footers that pick out text from the current page.
InDesign CS3 also answers the most popular feature request from users with its new support for automatic formatting of tables based on styles. As you would expect with InDesign the level of control offered is exceptional, with the ability to specify advanced features such as alternating, and custom, column and row patterns. You can also set up separate cell-based styles and these can be incorporated into the table style. The result is that you can import tables from Excel or Word and consistently format them, complete with differently-styled headers, footers and first and last column, and all with a single click.