Adobe InDesign

What is InDesign?

Adobe InDesign CS6 software lets you design and preflight engaging page layouts for print or digital distribution with built-in creative tools and precise control over typography. Integrate interactivity, video, and audio for playback on tablets, smartphones, and computers.

Create powerful, innovative digital documents

Engage, inform, and attract readers with documents you create in Adobe InDesign CS6 software, which integrate interactivity, video, and sound. Develop stronger, more compelling messages with rich interactive publications.

Folio Producer tools

Create and preview digital magazines, newspapers, and catalogs with engaging elements such as 360° object rotation and image panoramas for a wide variety of tablets. Upload to Adobe Digital Publishing Suite¹ for further production and distribution. Now you can create and share an unlimited number of .folio files.

Access to Adobe Digital Publishing Suite

Access the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite from within InDesign to publish engaging digital documents for a range of tablet devices.¹ New Single Edition now available for publishing to iPad.

Interactive documents and presentations

Add interactivity, motion, sound, and video to documents and presentations, exporting directly to SWF for playback in the Adobe Flash® Player runtime.

Export to Flash Professional

Export InDesign documents to Flash Professional to add sophisticated interactivity, animation, and navigation to complex layouts.

Create better eBooks with ePUB export enhancements

Design compelling eBooks while reducing your dependence on developers. Include video and audio in your eBooks, as well as images that resize to fit virtually any screen. Retain greater control of content and typography when exporting documents to the EPUB format.

Enhanced eBook authoring

Create more engaging eBooks, with less need for developers. Use a smoother workflow as you include refined typography and images that resize to fit virtually any screen. Even add video and audio for eBook reader applications that support HTML5 video and audio tags.²

Embedded video and audio in eBooks

Include video and audio in InDesign layouts you export to EPUB format to create more engaging digital books. Embedded audio and video play on mobile device that supports HTML5, like the Apple iPad.*

Articles panel

Control the sequence of text, images, and graphics when you export to EPUB or HTML without changing your InDesign layout. Organize your content by dragging it into the new Articles panel to define the export order.

Styles mapped to tags in EPUB export

More easily create standards-compliant digital documents with improved basic typography — with no manual code changes required. Map paragraph and character styles directly to HTML, EPUB, and PDF tags so they export using appropriate specifications.

Dynamic image resizing

Design and publish an EPUB eBook whose imagery will look good on virtually any size screen on which it is played — from a desktop monitor to a smartphone — making the content accessible and enjoyable on any device.

Do more in less time

Create, edit, and publish documents faster. New productivity features make page layout simpler and speedier, even when creating PDF documents that meet federal accessibility requirements.

Linked text

Maintain consistency more easily when working with content that’s duplicated throughout a document. Link identical text blocks within a layout so that changes to the parent block are automatically made in all the others.

Dragging and dropping of anchored objects

Add inline graphics and other anchored objects quickly and intuitively by simply dragging them to the desired anchor location in the text.

PDF accessibility enhancements

Reduce the time it takes to create PDF documents that are more accessible to people with disabilities. More easily add, edit, and view Alt text attributes associated with an image or object.

Preflighting, production, and printing

Speed up production, increase print reliability, and deliver error-free documents with live preflighting, document-installed fonts, JDF technology, background PDF export, presets, on-screen controls, and enhanced support for PDF/X standards.

Multiple page sizes

Create pages with different sizes in a single document.

Paragraphs that span or split columns

Quickly create text that spans or splits into multiple columns in just a few steps.

Simplified object selection and editing

Perform repetitive layout tasks efficiently using convenient tools and on-object controls.

Document-installed fonts

Help eliminate font substitution issues with document-installed fonts.

Track Text Changes

Mark up text directly in InDesign, easily tracking copy revisions.

Integration with Adobe CS Review

Create and share reviews online while working in InDesign through integration with Adobe CS Review, a CS Live online service.^3,4 See feedback in the context of your page layout.

Integration with other Adobe solutions

Move projects smoothly from design to print or digital output, thanks to tight integration with industry-leading Adobe software such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Flash Professional, and Digital Editions.

Integration with online services

Build engaging interactive documents for tablets and improve the efficiency of design processes using essential Adobe Digital Publishing Suite¹ and Adobe CS Live online services,^3,4 directly accessible from InDesign.

Productivity tools

Produce sophisticated page layouts using customer-inspired productivity features such as Smart Guides, rapid table creation, multiple-file placement, on-object controls, and the ability to create pages of different sizes in a single file.

Built-in creative tools

Explore creative possibilities directly within InDesign using integrated drawing tools, nondestructive effects, built-in Adobe Photoshop® effects, finer transparency controls, and support for 3D Photoshop artwork.

Adobe Mini Bridge

Find and drag images into page layouts from Adobe Mini Bridge without leaving InDesign.

Live captions

Generate static or live captions automatically from image metadata.

Automation

Create powerful automated workflows using standards-based XML features to lay out pages with text and images. Incorporate database-driven content for greater efficiency when publishing across channels.

Collaboration in editorial workflows

Improve collaboration between design and editorial teams with tight integration between InDesign CS5.5 and Adobe InCopy® CS5.5.

Extensibility

For custom publishing using InDesign Markup Language (IDML), an XML-based file format that enables developers to create or modify files using standard XML tools.

Robust text composition

Create beautiful, sophisticated text for any medium with professional typography features including styles, text wrap, the Paragraph Composer, OpenType® support, drop caps, and the ability to map styles to tags in EPUB export.

Enhanced PDF export options

Export PDF files that meet the PDF/X-4:2010, PDF/X-5:2010, and PDF/VT-1 standards for tight integration with Adobe Acrobat® X and Adobe PDF Print Engine 2.5.

Comprehensive Layers panel

Easily manage page items with a Layers panel that is similar to the one in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator®.