By combining photos from Photoshop and drawings from Illustrator with its own text, layout, formatting and output strengths, InDesign CS3 stands out as the central app in Adobe’s vision of the modern publishing workflow. It’s also the only one of the three main CS3 design apps that faces any serious competition.

To win the high-end publishing crown from QuarkXPress, InDesign must tackle head-on the one area where Quark has always excelled – productivity. The working environment is crucial, and the latest InDesign benefits from the new CS3 shared interface – customisable workspaces built on floatable palettes stacked neatly in collapsible docker windows to either side of the screen. For the other CS3 apps, this revolutionises working life, but as InDesign CS2 already boasted a similar system the benefits are less radical.

However, there are plenty of other enhancements that boost productivity: more control is now available via the main context-sensitive Control bar; the Pages palette now shows thumbnails of all pages, and you can drag within it to scroll and right-click to call up context-sensitive commands; double-clicking on an image frame automatically shifts from the Select to Direct Select tool so you can edit its content; frame fitting can now be set up in advance and as part of an object style; and the Quick Apply dialog now lists scripts as well as commands and offers filtering shortcuts.

The most impressive efficiency boost is completely new. You can now load multiple files for placing by dragging and dropping from the bundled version of Bridge CS3. Each file is represented at the cursor by a preview thumbnail, which you can quickly cycle through to place in the order you want. Multiple import naturally proves most useful when working with images, but it also works with text files and InDesign’s own INDD files. This new support for embedding native files means multiple users can collaborate on a single layout. However, unlike QuarkXPress 7’s composition zones, such collaboration is limited to single-page, rectangular areas.

As a professional publishing package, InDesign needs to be able to deal with any project that’s thrown at it, and one of the main focuses of this release is better handling of more advanced publications. A good example is the ability to create automatically bulleted and numbered list sequences with support for prefixes, style-based hierarchies and non-contiguous control. There’s also support for text variables that proves most valuable when linked to styles, making it possible to set up running headers and footers that pick out text from the current page.

InDesign CS3 offers numerous productivity enhancements.

InDesign CS3 also supports automatic formatting of tables based on styles. The level of control is exceptional, with the ability to specify advanced features such as alternating, and custom, column and row patterns. You can also set up separate cell-based styles and these can be incorporated into the table style. The result is you can import tables from Excel or Word and consistently format them, complete with styled headers, footers and first and last column, and all with a single click.

Perhaps the most powerful feature in InDesign CS3 is its radically enhanced Find/Change command. This lets you search across multiple documents, specify whether features such as locked and hidden layers should be included, and lets you save queries for reuse. More importantly, the dialog is now tabbed, so you’re no longer limited to traditional text searches, but can also search for particular glyphs or use regular expression-based GREP searches to find patterns and process the results (think wildcard searches on steroids). Most powerful of all is the new ability to find and change object properties.

You can specify and change basic attributes from style, stroke and fill through to anchor position and frame fitting. You can also search and replace based on a new feature of InDesign CS3 – object effects.

These object effects begin with those longstanding features – transparency, blend mode, drop shadow and feathering – that helped InDesign 2 redefine print design. Now, these have been extended again with a host of new effects: Inner Shadow, Outer Glow, Inner Glow, Bevel and Emboss and Satin. If these sound familiar, it’s because they’re the same effects Photoshop provides as layer styles. And InDesign CS3 also introduces two new options for producing Directional Feather and Gradient Feather effects – excellent for seamlessly merging an image with its background.

Thanks to its new effects, InDesign CS3 again raises the bar to enable richer-than-ever design, but perhaps just as significant is how the effects are implemented. Rather than separate palettes and multiple command dialogs, there’s now a centralised Effects palette that offers direct control over the most important transparency and blend mode settings and drop-down access to all other effects. These are in turn all handled by a single Effects dialog that makes it simpler to apply multiple effects and set up effect-based object styles. Even more powerful is the new ability to apply effects, not just to the object as a whole but individually to its stroke, fill and text. In other words, even while pushing the creative design envelope, InDesign CS3 again manages to boost efficiency and control.

This overriding emphasis on productivity is taken to its natural conclusion with InDesign CS3’s improved XML handling. This now supports XSLT on import, which proves both more forgiving and more flexible. More importantly, InDesign CS3 provides a rules-processing engine that can lay out and format a page by conditionally responding to data – for example, applying a particular object style to frames that contain a particular subheading style. Set up the rules and the XML correctly and you can watch the publication build itself.

Of course, the development effort involved in such XML automation is only an option for certain organisations and publications, but many more users and jobs will benefit from InDesign CS3’s enhanced XML-based output. Using the new Cross Media Export commands, you can output directly to XML or to XHTML. If you link the latter to an external CSS file during export, the resulting file can be automatically formatted for browser display based on the paragraph and character styles applied. Some users will undoubtedly be sorry to see the former Package for GoLive capability disappear, but the greater simplicity and transparency, and the natural tie-in with Dreamweaver, make this a more practical route to web reuse.

From initial import through to final output, this is a comprehensive upgrade with a clear focus on productivity. At times, the advanced power it offers leads to complexity, and those QuarkXPress fans who are happy within their comfort zone will accuse it of bloat – and rightly so, if they wouldn’t use the additional power. Ultimately, though, InDesign CS3 is capable of tackling harder jobs and producing better end results, and doing so even more efficiently than its rival. It fully deserves its professional publishing crown.