New InDesign update arrives with nice feature upgrades
The new InDesign update arrives with more than just a bunch of fixes. It gives us new controls for shading and borders in consecutive paragraphs. You can now export a document as individual page PDFs. There are several other things which might interest you. You can find them at Adobe’s What’s New page.
Dealing with consecutive paragraphs
As you probably recall, if you had shading or borders applied to consecutive paragraphs, you were forced to have a style for the beginning paragraph, the middle paragraphs, and the ending paragraph. You can see that procedure to the left.
We covered that in this post from last October when InDesign CC 2018 was released. I find these controls very helpful for sidebars conversions in ePUBs for example. Because there is normally no room for sidebars in smartphones or tablets, the best solution is to leave them inline with a border and a tint behind them. This visually places the sidebar where it is supposed to be—as extra, optional reading for the good readers.
New InDesign update arrives with new shading controls
The only quibbles are that the controls are only on the paragraph border page. But it works well. The offsets work where they hope they would—above the top paragraph and below the bottom paragraph in the group of paragraphs.
So, it makes an existing feature work better. That’s what incremental updates are supposed to do. Right?
The ability to export a document as separate PDF pages has been asked for a long time
Evidently, several workflows require this. I rarely need it but it’s nice.
If you’re addicted to AI or PS shortcuts
You can now make that choice. Seems silly to me as InDesign is much more powerful in creating custom shortcuts. But??
Richer analytics for Publish Online documents
Mainly, the overall analytics view is gone—replaced by an individual button for each item. As always it’s quite slow.
