Design professional layouts for print and digital publishing

Publish engaging documents for print, online, and mobile devices. Lay out compelling pages, brought to life with interactive media to attract new audiences and deliver enhanced reading experiences.


Adobe InDesign CS5 is also available as a component of: Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium, Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Standard, Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection

Adobe InDesign CS5 software lets you focus on your layout, with the flexibility to publish your pages to a wide range of media. Whether youre creating print or digital documents, you can save time with online services* that integrate with and are directly accessible from InDesign, as well as other substantial productivity enhancements. Whether you need to reposition an image within a frame or change the radius of a rounded corner, InDesign CS5 helps you work more efficiently.

A robust set of new tools let designers create interactive documents that capture readers attention both online and offline. Now you can include complex interactivity, animation, FLV video (a popular online video format), and MP3 audio files within InDesign documents. InDesign CS5 makes it easier to export documents in SWF format, hand off layouts to Adobe Flash Professional CS5 software, and produce EPUB documents for use with popular eBook readers and devices. InDesign CS5 has everything you need to lay out memorable and engaging pages in print or digital format.

With Adobe InDesign CS5, you can:

Streamline page layout reviews. Move through review cycles more smoothly with new capabilities in InDesign. The ability to track text changes in InDesign documents can make it much easier for designers to identify and manage editorial changes. Team InDesign with Adobe CS Review, part of new Adobe CS Live online services for more efficient reviews. Because CS Review integrates with InDesign, you can incorporate reviews directly into your design process, eliminating the need to keep track of email attachments, manage an FTP server, or print pages for reviewers. Integration with CS Review lets you create and share reviews and receive feedback in context without leaving InDesign.

Do more in less time. Create, preflight, and publish documents faster. New and enhanced tools and on-object controls help speed up and simplify repetitive, everyday tasks such as selecting and editing frames and frame content, adjusting the white space between images, or creating grids. Span text over multiple columns without creating a new text frame to quickly create headlines or subheads. The ability to create pages with different sizes in a single InDesign file, a new Layers panel, document fonts that are installed and uninstalled automatically, and other productivity features in InDesign CS5 let you complete your page layout in fewer steps.

Create compelling, interactive digital documents. Engage and inform your readers with interactivity, animation, video, and sound. Integrate rich media into any InDesign document. Export your layout as an interactive PDF document that includes audio, SWF files, and FLV files. Export InDesign documents directly to SWF files for anyone to view using Adobe Flash Player. To create even more sophisticated interactive documents, hand off your InDesign pages to Flash Professional CS5. InDesign typography, page design, layers, animation, sound, and video all remain intact in Flash Professional for greater page fidelity.

Who uses InDesign?

Designers, production specialists, and printers use InDesign to lay out, preflight, and publish documents for print, online, or to mobile devices. InDesign offers precise control over typography to deliver professional results in any medium. Creative professionals take advantage of its tight integration with leading industry tools, including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Acrobat, and Adobe Flash Professional software.

Professional photographers use InDesign CS5 to showcase their photographs. They create compelling photo albums, custom-branded contact sheets, and digital portfolios that integrate interactivity, animation, and sound.

Top new features of Adobe InDesign CS5

Interactive documents and presentations

Engage and inform readers and clients with documents and presentations that integrate interactivity, animation, sound, and video. Help reduce costs by creating interactivity directly in InDesign.

New intuitive panels help you add rich media to page layouts:

Animation panel. Apply the same motion presets included in Flash Professional CS5, or add your own custom presets to InDesign to instantly animate objects on the page without writing code. Options in the Animation panel let you specify duration, speed, rotation, scale, and opacity. Quickly edit a motion path using the Pen tool, and convert any path - even one you import from Illustrator - into a custom motion path with the click of a button.

Object States panel. Create multi-state objects that indicate which button is selected, display images in a slide show, or show versions of text in different languages. Multi-state objects are page items that have multiple appearances. Object states can be images, text frames, or any other objects or groups you want to display when someone clicks or rolls over an interactive button while viewing an interactive document. For example, you might create a multi-state object that consists of multiple images to create a click-through slide show; when the viewer clicks a button, the next image appears.

Timing panel. Control animation timing and playback without having to use a timeline to add keyframes or create motion tweens. Use the Timing panel to determine when objects such as bullet points in a presentation or images on a page should animate in the interactive document. For example, animations can be triggered to play when the page loads, when the page is clicked, or when a button is clicked. Loop the animation or play it a specific number of times. Link objects to animate simultaneously, with the same or different durations.

Media panel. Preview and scrub through placed video files without leaving InDesign. You can select a frame from the video sequence to represent the video in your InDesign document before the video plays, and even create navigation points that determine which parts of the video play when you click a button or otherwise trigger an action.

Preview panel. Take animations, buttons, and other interactive elements for a test drive without leaving InDesign. You no longer have to re-export your content every time you make a change to any rich media element - interactivity, animation, video, or sound - just to see how the change affects the document. Instead, preview and test a selection, the page, or the entire document before you export your final SWF file.

Simplified object selection and editing

Perform repetitive layout tasks efficiently in InDesign CS5. Numerous improvements can help make tasks such as aligning and distributing objects or customizing frame corners faster and easier.

Multiple transformations with a single tool. You can use one tool to select, align, distribute, rotate, resize, reposition, crop, and scale frames and frame content. InDesign CS5 dynamically switches to the right tool for the job, so you never need to lift your mouse from the layout. The new Content Grabber lets you quickly reposition content within a frame, just by clicking and dragging. A real-time crop preview helps you position the content precisely where you want it.

Gap tool. Adjust the white space between objects to dynamically reposition page items while maintaining design relationships. Shift the white space up or down, left or right, without having to crop or resize each object on the page individually. You can even expand or contract the white space, dynamically resizing or cropping adjacent objects accordingly. The new Auto Fit feature keeps the relationship between the object and its frame consistent as you resize the frame.

Live Corner Effects. Drag the corners of a frame to dynamically change the radius and shape of the frame directly in the layout. Modify one corner at a time or all four simultaneously.

Easy grid placement. Take the tedium out of placing images in a grid, as in a directory or catalog. Simply press arrow keys to add columns and rows for images or threaded text frames.

Integration with Adobe CS Review

Streamline reviews and accelerate your design workflow with CS Review, a new Adobe CS Live online service that integrates with InDesign CS5. Using CS Review, you can create and share documents for online review within InDesign. Colleagues and clients can view your document online and add comments with easy-to-use annotation tools directly in their browsers. All comments are automatically displayed in InDesign CS5, within the context of your page layout. Clicking a comment shows you the content it references, so you can easily match comments to the appropriate areas of page design. Simple sharing, easy access to reviews, and centralized comments speed up the review process to help you finish your project on time and within budget. CS Live online services are complimentary for a limited time.

Multiple page sizes

Simplify file management by creating pages of different sizes in a single document. Whether youre designing marketing collateral, brand identity deliverables, or a magazine layout with complex folds, keeping all of a projects assets in the same file shortens design and production time.

The new Page Selection tool makes it easy to select individual pages, which you can resize using options in the Control panel. You can easily share design assets by applying the same master pages to pages of varying sizes. With the Page Selection tool, you can even reposition the master page content for different layouts: select the page, select Show Master Page Overlay in the Control panel, and then drag the edge of the master page to position it over the page.

Track text changes

Get to final copy faster now that you can track text changes directly in your InDesign document. You can write, edit, and mark up text in InDesign with no need to import separate text files and remap styles every time there are copy changes.

With Track Changes enabled, InDesign keeps track of additions, revisions, and deletions in the document. The page layout remains uncluttered; to see the changes, simply open the Story Editor. There, you can accept or reject changes using options similar to those in popular word-processing applications. InDesign automatically assigns a different color for changes made by each user, so you can easily see whos made the edits.

Paragraphs that span and split columns

Quickly format headlines, subheads, or any text to span multiple columns in a single text frame. In previous versions of InDesign, all text in a frame conformed to the column width. To span a headline across multiple columns, you had to cut the headline out of the story and paste it into a separate text frame. Now you can apply settings to a paragraph, specifying whether the text should span some or all columns, or split columns, so that InDesign automatically reflows what was one column into two or more columns.

All-new Layers panel

The Layers panel has been completely rebuilt. If youre familiar with the Layers panel in Illustrator and Photoshop, youll feel right at home in InDesign. You can now view not only layers but the individual objects they contain. Select, hide, name, lock, and change the stacking order of objects such as text frames, images, and shapes directly within the Layers panel.

Reconfiguring grouped objects is fast and easy. With a quick click, you can reveal the hierarchy of objects within a group, including any hidden objects. Then, simply drag objects from one group to another in the Layers panel - with no need to ungroup, select items, and regroup.

Production enhancements

InDesign CS5 includes several productivity advances designed to help you deliver print and digital documents faster. Improved integration with Adobe Bridge software and the new Adobe Mini Bridge panel in InDesign, document-installed fonts, and the ability to export PDF documents in the background all can help you meet deadlines with ease.

The new document-installed fonts feature helps avoid the inconvenience of missing fonts during production and printing. When you package a document, InDesign includes fonts used in that document. When that document is opened on another system, InDesign looks for a document fonts folder and automatically installs those fonts for use only in that document. It then uninstalls them when the document is closed. This timesaving feature can help avoid costly design and print errors. While InDesign takes the hassle out of installing the fonts required for printing a design project, the appropriate font licenses are still required for any party creating or printing the document.

Now you can preview individual pages in an InDesign document in Bridge without opening InDesign. You can also view thumbnail previews of the images placed in an InDesign document in Bridge without having to open the InDesign file first, making it easier to locate and reuse images.

In InDesign CS5, you can access much of the power of Bridge without leaving InDesign. Locate InDesign files, images, videos, and other assets using Mini Bridge, and drag them directly into position in your document.

Maximize your production time by exporting PDF documents in the background. InDesign takes advantage of 64-bit multithreading, so you can export large files as you work on other projects.

Print to digital

Quickly and efficiently extend your page content to the web, onto mobile devices, or for playback in Adobe Flash Player.

Hand off InDesign CS5 pages to Flash Professional CS5 with greater fidelity. The new text engine in Flash Professional retains typography you created in InDesign, including threaded text frames, so you can easily make last-minute text edits in Flash Professional. Multi-state objects and placed video and audio files included in the InDesign CS5 layout are carried over into Flash Professional. Objects animated with motion presets in InDesign are added to the Flash Professional timeline as motion objects. The original layer structure of the InDesign document is re-created in the Flash Professional timeline, so the Flash developer can easily understand how pages were created.

Create compelling eBooks with enhanced support for the EPUB file format. Author eBooks that can be read on a variety of devices such as the Apple iPad, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble nook, mobile phones, or personal computers using Microsoft® Windows® or Mac OS. Include interactivity, animation, sound, and video to bring eBooks to life when read on a personal computer using Adobe Digital Editions, a desktop reading application. Enhanced export features include the ability to control content reading order based on document structure, support for prebuilt CSS to provide consistent styling, support for chapter breaks, improved table formatting, and font subsetting.

Get a head start building web pages with enhanced export features that let you repurpose InDesign text and image content using Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 software. Using the Structure panel in InDesign, you can control the order in which page content is placed on the web page when imported into Dreamweaver. InDesign now generates CSS definitions that more closely match the text attributes you specify in InDesign to give you greater control over typography and reduce the need to rework text in Dreamweaver.

Live captions

Generate static or live captions for an image automatically from its metadata. Adding a caption such as the photographers name or copyright information directly from metadata stored with the image saves time and helps minimize the chance of error.

Live captions change as the metadata changes. Static captions use metadata when you generate them, but arent updated later. You can convert a live caption to a static caption at any time.


Top reasons to upgrade to Adobe InDesign CS5

Interactive documents and presentations - Engage and inform readers with documents and presentations that integrate interactivity, animation, sound, and video. Export documents directly from InDesign to SWF files for playback in Adobe Flash Player.

Simplified object selection and editing - Perform repetitive layout tasks efficiently. Manipulate frames and frame content without switching tools. Dynamically adjust white space between objects while maintaining the relationship between frames. Use on-object controls to modify frame corners directly in the layout.

Integration with Adobe CS Review - Create and share document reviews online from within InDesign through integration with CS Review, a new CS Live online service. Invite colleagues and clients to comment using just a browser. Using the CS Review integration in InDesign, you can view comments in the context of your InDesign layout, making it easier to address feedback to meet project deadlines more efficiently.

Multiple page sizes - Create pages with different sizes in a single document to streamline file management. Share the same master page across different-sized layouts for greater efficiency.

Tracked text changes - Mark up text directly in InDesign and easily track copy revisions. Get to final copy faster by accepting or rejecting text changes within the document.

Paragraphs that span and split columns - Quickly format headlines, subheads, or any text to span multiple columns in a single text frame without having to create separate text frames.

All-new Layers panel - Easily manage layers in simple and complex documents. Quickly find, select, lock, hide, name, and change the stacking order of individual page items directly in the Layers panel. Drag objects from one group to another. The new Layers panel behavior is similar to the Layers panel in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.

Production enhancements - Speed up delivery of print and digital documents. Preview InDesign pages and placed images in Adobe Bridge. Find linked assets used in one layout and drag them into another InDesign document using the integrated Mini Bridge panel.

Eliminate missing fonts - InDesign automatically installs the required fonts when you open a document and uninstalls them when you close it. Appropriate font licensing is still required.

Digital export - Export your page design and text layouts with greater fidelity to Flash Professional CS5, retaining animation, video, and sound from your InDesign document. Export InDesign content as XHTML with greater control over page order for editing in Adobe Dreamweaver CS5. Export eBooks authored in InDesign CS5 to industry-standard EPUB files for reading on laptops or mobile devices, including the Apple iPad, Sony Reader, and Barnes & Noble nook. Include rich media to bring eBooks to life when read on a personal computer using Adobe Digital Editions, a desktop reading application.

Live captions - Generate static or live captions automatically from image metadata, and add text before or after the selected metadata tag in InDesign. Specify the position and style of the caption, optionally including the caption on its own layer.