Adobe Announces InDesign 2.0, Including Support For Mac OS X 10.1

Adobe announced InDesign 2.0 today. InDesign 2.0 is Adobeis layout product designed to compete with Quark Xpress, and the new version will include support for Mac OS X 10.1. Mac OS X 10.1 hasnit been released as of this writing, but is expected this month. InDesign 2.0 includes new features and other enhancements. According to Adobe:

Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced the new version of its professional layout and design program, Adobe® InDesign® 2.0. Developed with the feedback of graphics professionals worldwide, InDesign 2.0 software helps solve many layout and design problems customers have today and delivers the tools to manage cross-media publishing now and in the future. New features such as extensible markup language (XML) import and export support, transparency, table creation, long document support, a superior printing interface, native Mac OS X support and tighter integration with other Adobe products, enables graphic designers, production artists and prepress professionals to exercise design innovation and improve productivity

Creativity Without Limits

New creativity features in InDesign remove arbitrary limits faced by todayis professional designers. The transparency feature is the first of its kind for page layout software, allowing designers to quickly and easily produce and edit effects that previously required other applications to accomplish. Users can apply editable drop shadows, feathering, and opacity settings to objects, and can place transparent Adobe Photoshop®, Adobe Illustrator® and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files into InDesign. With the new table creation features, designers can quickly turn tab-delimited text into tables or import styled Microsoft® Word and Excel tables directly. Plus, they can refine these tables by instantly applying color fills to alternating rows, adjusting row height and column width, inserting inline graphics into cells, and more.

Enhanced Productivity and Performance

InDesign 2.0 delivers the long document support customers need. Designers can group related documents into book lists to number pages and generate tables of contents and indexes. The streamlined new printing interface reflects the input of hundreds of print professionals and ensures that InDesign fits smoothly and reliably into a wide variety of professional print workflows. Performance enhancements make InDesign 2.0 significantly faster.

Increased Integration

InDesign 2.0 integrates more tightly than ever with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat through its Adobe standard user interface, native file import and direct export of Adobe PDF files. In addition, these Adobe applications share core technologies such as the Adobe Color Engine, so designers can produce more reliable color. With native support for Mac OS X (version 10.1), InDesign easily supports the latest Macintosh systems.

InDesign and Network Publishing

InDesign 2.0 enables creative professionals to more effectively create, manage and deliver visually rich content to multiple channels including print, Web and PDAs. With the new Structure View and Tag palette, InDesign introduces built-in, extensible support for exporting Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as well as importing and exporting XML files. This enables an exchange of assets that helps close the gap between professional print and web workflows, and also provides tighter integration with products like Adobe GoLive® software. Through its tagged Adobe PDF support, InDesign exports graphically rich eBooks that can be viewed on different devices. InDesign also supports Adobeis XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) for embedding metadata in documents.

You can find more information on InDesign 2.0 at Adobeis Web site. The upgrade is priced at US$149 for owners of version 1.x of InDesign (US$99 for 90 days), and the company is offering a free upgrade to those who buy InDesign 1.5 starting today until 2.0 is released. Adobe expects to release InDesign 2.0 in the first quarter of 2002.