Adobe CS2!

April 4, 2005 · Comments

As expected, Adobe announced the next version of [Creative Suite](http://store.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/overview.html) today.

The upgrade from CS1 (Standard edition) is only $349! That’s not terrible for 3 full applications plus Version Cue and the other goodies. I was expecting it to be around $500. Amazon [has it](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00080DQ12/momathomedesi-20) for $344.99 so I may order it there.

I couldn’t see any features in Photoshop, InDesign or Illustrator marked “Windows only.” That’s a relief.

I am definitely ordering the upgrade. There are features in each application that made me say “gotta have that.”

[InDesign Magazine's](http://www.indesignmag.com) new issue, released today, goes into detail. InDesign already blows the Q-word out of the water. This (hopefully) puts the nail in its coffin.

I’m not going to rehash all the new features of each application, but these are the ones that are making me warm up the ‘ole business Visa card:

InDesign:

**Object Styles:** Paragraph styles for objects. I already use Woodwing Software’s [SmartStyles](http://www.woodwing.com/smartstyles.htm) and I love it. But this looks so much better. With SmartStyles, if I change something in a style I have to create a new one. With CS2’s feature, I can set everything in a dialog box and change as I go.

**Place Multi-Page PDFs!:** Self-explanatory, and hallelujah!

**Map Word styles to InDesign:** This is *huge*. Anyone who has spent an hour in Word setting up style sheets in the client’s document so the import into InDesign/Q-Word is less painful is swooning at this one.

**Save backwards:** Your service provider takes 6 months to upgrade to new versions when you’re hitting the pre-order button? No problem. InDesign CS2 lets you save your documents in InDesign CS format. This was a big problem when CS came out and you couldn’t back save to InDesign 2. Of course, most printers do take PDFs nowadays.

Photoshop:

I’ll have to play with it for a while, but there wasn’t as much here that made me giddy in my seat. **Adobe Bridge** looks interesting. So does the **Smart Objects** feature which lets you make more than just type and routine shapes as vector in Photoshop.

Illustrator:

**Control Palette:** Looks like they took the wonderful context-sensitive palette from InDesign and brought it over to Illustrator. Would be wonderful if Illustrator and Photoshop also adopted InDesign’s docked palettes, but that’s not clear from the docs on the Adobe site.

**Stroke adjustments:** Select a stroke as inside, outside or centered on an object. Yah! No more math olympics as you add a 10pt stroke to something and have to adjust the width to fit in the same space as the object with a 2pt stroke. Don’t need this all the time, worth it when I do.

**Colorize grayscale:** Yes!! Not a big deal when working on web graphics (which I do mostly in Fireworks anyway) but huge when working on spot color files for print.

**Live Trace:** This looks great, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Even in Photoshop, using automatic settings to trace bitmap art to make it vector is often a waste of time. I end up taking out the pen tool to get the exact point control I want.

So it looks like InDesign is the must-have app for me but the low upgrade price makes the complete set worth it. I’m sure I’ll have more to say when I have the box in my hand.

By the way, I’m reading the new issue of *InDesign Magazine* and there’s this question on page 24:

>How do I automatically center text boxes to a page?

Sandee Cohen’s answer is great, as always. She explains two methods that work. The first is to draw a box the size of the document and then center the text box to that. Another method uses the transform palette and a center point to move the object. I have a third way. Hit Command/Control-0 (zero) to automatically resize and center your page on your screen. Now select the text box you want to center on the page and cut it (command/control-x). Paste it (command/control-v) and it will be in the center of the page by default.

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