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Adobe Indesign CS3 [Mac] [OLD VERSION]

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From: Adobe
Category: Software

List Price: ~~$699.00~~
Buy New: $549.00
You Save: $150.00 (21%)

New (3) from $549.00

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3 reviews
Sales Rank: 3616

Format: Dvd-rom
Platforms: Mac Os X Intel, Mac Os X
Media: DVD-ROM
Edition: Standard
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Operating System: Mac OS X Intel
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 0 x 0.1 x 0.1

MPN: L90568
Model: 17510933
UPC: 883919083964
EAN: 0883919083964
ASIN: B000NDIBCI

Release Date: July 9, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Features:

•	The ideal solution for designing professional page layouts using rich creative options
•	Boost efficiency through productivity enhancements and tight integration
•	Automate workflows and processes, including long-document publishing
•	Flexible XML import and export controls and robust scripting support
•	Design compelling page layouts that include transparency, creative effects, and gradient feathers

Accessories:

•	Mac OS X Version 10.5.4 Leopard

Audience benefit

Graphic designers
Discover new levels of creative freedom and productivity with Adobe InDesign CS3 software. Tightly integrated with the Adobe applications you use most, InDesign CS3 delivers efficient production workflows and a more fluid creative environment for designing professional layouts with sophisticated graphics and typography.

Adobe PageMaker users
There's never been a better time for PageMaker users to switch to Adobe InDesign CS3 software. With its built-in support for familiar PageMaker features, such as multiple undo, robust style support, flexible gradients, easy table creation, and more, InDesign CS3 brings you a new level of creative freedom and productivity. It's also packed with features to help smooth your transition, including support for converting PageMaker 6.0-7.x files, a set of PageMaker compatible keyboard shortcuts, and popular PageMaker features such as Data Merge and Print Booklet for imposition. With an exclusive upgrade price for licensed PageMaker users, InDesign CS3 delivers superb functionality at a compelling value.

Print service providers
Adobe InDesign CS3 software addresses the needs of print professionals worldwide for reliable, consistent output controls. Encourage your customers to preflight and package their InDesign projects to help ensure smoother handoffs. Prevent costly errors on press by evaluating and adjusting separations, overprint, and transparency flattener settings onscreen. Then use print presets to output files more efficiently. Easily set up high-end Adobe PDF-based print production workflows, automate processes using JDF, and provide Adobe PDF export presets to customers to get the best results. With InDesign CS3, you can exercise exacting control over your print production workflow.

IT professionals and developers
Invest in Adobe InDesign CS3 software for professional page layout to help streamline production, reduce costs, and increase quality in your publishing workflows. Tight integration with other Adobe applications and built-in support for native Adobe file formats helps shorten production cycles while better supporting all-digital workflows. InDesign snippets, style sets, custom workspaces, and other resources allow teams to work more efficiently and consistently. Flexible XML import and export controls, plus robust scripting support, lay a strong foundation for automating workflows and efficiently publishing to multiple media. Join leading publishers and design organizations worldwide in achieving higher productivity with better quality and lower costs using InDesign CS3.

The Effects button is one of many new options included in the context-sensitive Control panel (above) as well as being available in the Effects panel itself.

Top Ten New Features

Creative effects and controls
Design compelling page layouts that include transparency, creative effects, and gradient feathers. Since effects are live and nondestructive, you can experiment with ease. Apply effects independently to an object's stroke, fill, or content.

Productivity enhancements
Perform a variety of tasks more efficiently using new and enhanced productivity features, including Multi-file Place, Quick Apply, faster frame fitting, and the visual Pages panel.

Table and cell styles
Quickly and consistently format tables using table and cell styles. Even use regional cell styles to apply unique formatting to specific areas of a table, such as its header, footer, and body.

Robust long-document support
Maintain consistency and streamline the production of long documents using advanced bullets and numbering, running headers and footers, and synchronized master pages.

Advanced Find/Change on text and objects
Apply changes to text and object attributes across one or more documents. Include master pages, footnotes, and locked or hidden layers in a search; save search settings for easy reuse; and perform grep pattern-based searches on strings of text.

XHTML export
Enable multiformat publishing, including print-to-web workflows, by exporting Adobe InDesign content as XHTML. Edit the exported content in Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 software (available separately) and automatically format it using cascading style sheets.

Intuitive and customizable workspace
Work in an environment that makes it easier to be productive. Keep just the tools, panels, and menus you use most at your fingertips, and dock self-adjusting panels out of the way when not in use to free up your workspace.

Placed InDesign files
Reuse layouts by placing INDD files in another InDesign document. Links remain intact, and InDesign automatically notifies you of updates to the linked INDD file.

Rule-based layouts from XML
Use scripts that apply rules to automatically build page layouts and format text and graphics from XML content.

Automation through scripting
Automate tasks by writing scripts in JavaScript, AppleScript, and VBScript. Attach a JavaScript to a menu command so it runs automatically when the command is chosen, and protect scripts for commercial use through enhanced JavaScript.

Create XHTML files for product listings and more.

You can select the objects you want to export to XHTML, if you don't want to export an entire document.

Inspect and manage XML data with the Structure pane.

Additional Features

Extensive integration
Work smoothly with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, InCopy, and Dreamweaver software; enjoy consistency by using shared presets and color settings; work more efficiently with native file format support; and easily publish to multiple media.

Reliable prepress and printing
Have confidence in your output. Get accurate, consistent results every time you print using sophisticated preview capabilities, exporting reliable Adobe PDF files, and sharing custom presets.

Professional typographical controls
Compose beautiful typography using professional controls including the Paragraph Composer, OpenType fonts, drop caps, glyphs, and optical kerning and margin alignment.

Full-featured tables
Create richly formatted tables. Import tab-delimited text files and styled Microsoft Word or Excel tables, or build tables in InDesign. Apply a wide variety of formatting options manually or using table and cell styles.

Smart text handling
Control your text with intelligent text-handling features including the ability to import styled text from Microsoft Word files, apply complex text wraps around objects, and comprehensively replace fonts.

Scripting and extensibility
Accelerate and simplify workflows by automating processes using scripts and extending the capabilities of InDesign using the ExtendScript toolkit.

Creative effects
Apply new visual effects, such as inner glow or bevel and emboss, using an interface that's consistent with Adobe Photoshop to specify offset, angle, and other options. Apply effects independently to an object's stroke, fill, and content.

Gradient feathers
Create beautiful effects by applying masks that contain gradients so the objects fade into the background. Customize options such as gradient angles and fade rates, all within Adobe InDesign.

Adobe-standard user interface
Get up to speed quickly with familiar commands, tools, panels, and keyboard shortcuts.

Backward compatibility
Open QuarkXPress 3.3-4.1x files, PageMaker 6.0-7.x files, and files created in earlier versions of Adobe InDesign in InDesign Interchange (INX) format in InDesign CS3 to keep working with legacy files.

Adobe Photoshop and Adobe PDF layer support
Control the visibility of layers in imported Photoshop and PDF files. Experiment with design options or use multiple variations of a file in your layout, all while linking to a single file.

Adobe PDF file export
Use built-in Adobe PDF export presets--or create custom presets--to consistently and reliably create Adobe PDF files for electronic review or final output. Create ISO-standard PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3 files for high-resolution CMYK printing, as well as PDF/X-4 (draft) files.

Multiple Undo/Redo
Experiment freely and retrace multiple steps using the Undo and Redo commands.

High-resolution graphics preview
Display graphics in high resolution for precision work or to preview the graphics within your layout. Easily switch back to lower resolution view for faster onscreen display.

Enhanced Control panel
See more options in the context-sensitive Control panel, including transparency, text wrap, and rotation. Customize the panel to show the options you use most frequently.

Custom print presets
Define and share custom print presets among service providers and customers for a fast, reliable way to print jobs that require consistent settings for many print options.

JDF integration between Adobe InDesign and Acrobat
Pass JDF job information to Acrobat with Adobe PDF files that you export from InDesign. Print service providers can then streamline prepress and print processes using JDF automation.

Output previews
Prevent mistakes from occurring on press by checking plates, overprinting, and ink limits, and help ensure the best results when printing transparency effects using output preview panels. Use Overprint Preview mode to proof spot-color effects and overprint settings.

Preflight and packaging
Avoid delays and costly production errors by preflighting documents to check for problems. Then package them for print or web handoff or export them as Adobe PDF files.

Consistent color
Synchronize ICC-based color management settings across Adobe applications to achieve consistent color onscreen. Exchange swatches across the components of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design software.

Flexible XML workflows
Use XML rules to dynamically generate documents with formatting and graphics based on imported XML, and apply XSLT style sheets when importing or exporting XML content.

ExtendScript utility
Use the ExtendScript toolkit to create, edit, and debug JavaScripts in InDesign.

Customer Reviews:

3 out of 5 stars

Blindingly Slow, Idiosyncratic November 3, 2008
ladyjanegray
As a previous reviewer mentioned, this is a professional product, and for those of us who have used Pagemaker-like products for decades, nothing else quite comes close.

Yet some aspects are absolutely maddening. To take a minor example: if you open an InDesign file by double-clicking it, Adobe cannot for the life of it figure out the directory path for that file. All it knows is the location of the last saved file. I own dozens of shareware programs that can do better than this.

The biggest issue for me is the speed. It crawls, even on the Intel Macs.

4 out of 5 stars

Adobe descriptions VERY CONFUSING - BEWARE May 12, 2008
Avid Reader (Boston, MA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful

ADOBE AND AMAZON do a very poor job of describing and differentiating between the various CS3 software offerings - when we first bought CS3 our goal was to get it with in-design - THis was marked Indesign CS3 - this in fact is ONLY INdesign. What we really needed to order was Adobe CS3 Standard - which includes Indesign - the website does an awful job if making this clear. Really this is sad - since the products & Amazon are really excellent resources.

4 out of 5 stars

John Farr's MyMac.com Review September 18, 2007
Tim E Robertson (Battle Creek, Mi United States)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful

LAZY AND CRAZY, TOO!
Until I started working on this review, I'd never used the software. (Uh-oh.) InDesign CS3 isn't for beginners, yet I'm no beginner as a writer. From my perspective, I take it as a given that InDesign CS3 is a professional-level layout and desktop publishing program with far more capabilities and control over all aspects of typography and design than any word-processing application. If I could craft a better manuscript with it, I wanted to try -- no one should be afraid of using the very best tools. Hearing that I was going to write a review, however, my brother Bob in Austin emailed me to say,

With features like indexes, libraries, table of contents, links, & bookmarks that you probably won't notice and might not ever appreciate unless you actually wanted to build a table of contents, an index, publish in both print & eletronic formats with a fancy PDF containing "click-able" table of contents or multi-media features, it's a daunting assignment. I know you're not asking, but I'd recommend you at least try to touch on the Library palette, Paragraph Styles, and Character Styles. Also check out Drop Shadows, Corner Effects, Transparency, Word Wrap, Glyphs, Find/Replace and Drop Caps. That way your review will appear like you know what you're talking about. ;-p

Did he say "daunting"? Indeed. So this will be a streamlined story very different from the usual review. Experienced users may find what follows intolerably frustrating, while novices, dreamers, or pros in other areas could end up commiserating or cheering from the sidelines. Let's find out!

TAKE ONE
I knew nothing. I wanted something. How best to make InDesign CS3 actually deliver? I decided that the best approach would be to produce a mini-manuscript of perhaps a dozen pages. At this stage, there was no way I'd be able to take advantage of everything the application offered, but if I could do one, I could do another, and another, and so on, and eventually I'd learn. But even coming from a raw beginner, the end result would be an InDesign document that I could output to print or electronic publishing, and when working with my favorite graphic designer, I could send her a working document for her to fix. The workflow would begin and end with InDesign.

Naturally, I got stuck right away. Poking around the menus made me feel like I was in another country, so I knew I had to break down and open Adobe Help, where I watched a video by Colin Fleming on "Creating a New Document." He did a nice job but had me hopping madly back and forth from Google or my Dashboard dictionary so I could understand the lingo -- in the Land of Print, they don't speak English! A "slug," for example, is a variably sized area of white space around and below the document where one can have notes and print job information. I also learned that the default margin of "3p0" refers to three picas, 1.27 cm., or half an inch. (This required googling "three picas," because searching for "3p0" returned a zillion android hits...) "Pica," incidentally, means 4.23 mm, an eating disorder, the Portland -- or Perth -- Institute for Contemporary Art, the Pacific Islanders Cultural Association, the Podiatry Insurance Company of America, and the Photo Imaging Council of Australia, among many other things. If you spell it with a "k," you get a rodent!

Three hours later, it was clear that "lazy" smart guy wouldn't cut it. After plodding through more Help pages that I could count, I still didn't know what the zero in "3p0" meant and seriously considered changing the subheading of this review to, "If an idiot uses InDesign to write a thank-you note, will anybody care?"

Humbled, I devoted the rest of the day and most of the night to reading pages in the Help Viewer and trying to make sense of online tutorials. Believe me, there are scads of them. Adobe is very helpful in this regard, although no one seems to design instructional material for people from another planet, which was basically my position here. Searching for "how to actually make text appear inside a window on your screen" will get you nowhere, for example, yet that was exactly what I needed to know. Eventually, of course, I found out that text goes inside a "text frame," which you either create on the page with the Text tool or else end up with in full page size if you select "Master Text Frame" when you create a document. I did that for my initial 12-page experiment, using default margins and a custom 5.5 x 8.5 inch paper size (for paperback books).

As one might guess, I crashed and burned. There's no better way to learn fast, however! 12 pages was too small, my master page was set up wrong, etc. And as I saw more and more of what InDesign could do, my ambition grew. I decided to scrap the first attempt and start all over. But first, the answer to a burning question on every Adobe PR rep's mind:

HEY, WHERE ARE THE SCREENSHOTS?!
Okay, here's one (below). As you can see, screenshots are useless in this context because a) the interface is complex and humongous, b) you can't read much at 600 pixels wide, c) this thing is all-business and frankly kinda ugly, and d) I don't know what half of these panels do. Also, be advised that InDesign CS3 is an awfully tight fit on a MacBook desktop: you'll want the biggest monitor(s) you can find. The good news is that Adobe has designed everything you see here to snap together so you can create a much leaner, customized workspace once you know what you're doing.

TAKE TWO
No more "manuscript" nonsense, I would create an EBOOK! It worked, too. You can download it now (PDF, 312 KB) and follow along or wait until the end of the review. This would be set up for printing as a paperback at 5.5 x 8.5 inches like before -- in case I expanded it for publication -- but since I'd only be exporting it to PDF at first, I left out the print-specific blank pages.

InDesign CS3 allows you to create a Book file, which is actually a package containing separate InDesign documents relating to the different sections of a typical book. I created two documents, one for the actual text, consisting of four previously-published columns for Horse Fly, a monthly Taos newspaper, and one for the "front matter." Front matter is all the junk at the front of a book: title page, copyright info, table of contents, and so on. Using separate documents for each section allowed me to use a different master page for each one. As you might think, the master page contains items (objects) that apply to all pages in that document. I didn't want a header or page numbers in the front matter, so this was very handy. Yes, there are other ways to do this, but this is how I managed it, and managing is the entire thrust of this already too-long review.

I created the ebook itself by choosing "Export Book to PDF" from the Book panel menu. Here's a screenshot of the first two facing pages opened in Preview (details below):

1. Cover created in Photoshop CS3. Copying and pasting images into InDesign CS3 is super-easy.
2. Ebook is 20 pages long, 5.5 x 8.5 inches, maybe hell to print out. I used Acrobat Pro to link the Table of Contents items, but I'll bet that can be set up first in InDesign. The bookmarks mostly work: for some reason they don't show up at all anymore in Acrobat Pro, do show up in Adobe Reader, and sometimes function in Preview. Chalk it up to ignorance on my part.
3. Fonts used are Blackoak Std, Bookman Old Style, and mostly Book Antiqua.
4. Haven't downloaded yet? Go for it!

CONCLUSIONS
This is high-class software, more than capable of handling virtually any publishing project. At $699 a pop, most writers and creative professionals aren't going to rush out and buy a copy just for the hell of it. On the other hand, it seems there's nothing it can't do. It's hideously complex, but the Help section mostly rocks, and Adobe directs you to some excellent video tutorials. But I just made an ebook! It took me 72 hours of trial and error, but I did it, with absolutely no prior experience with the application. Not only do I now have an actual product (which you can have for free), but I can send the original InDesign CS3 files to someone who knows what she's doing when I'm ready to have the book expanded or re-designed. I'm working with InDesign from the get-go, and every time I launch it, I'll learn a little more.

In doing my research for this article, I found that there are folks who call Photoshop and Illustrator "plug-ins" for InDesign. After this week, I think I know what they mean! Look for more articles about my continuing adventures with InDesign here at MyMac -- one just isn't going to do...

System Requirements:
PowerPC G4 or G5 or multicore Intel processor
Mac OS X v.10.4.8
512MB of RAM
1.4GB of available hard-disk space (additional free space required during installation)
1,024x768 monitor resolution with 16-bit video card
DVD-ROM drive
Internet or phone connection required for product activation
Broadband Internet connection required for Adobe Stock Photos and other services.Blackoak

MyMac.com rating, 4 out of 5.
Originally published at http://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=3006. See that page for all screen shots

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