Adobe today announced InDesign 2.0, the company’s professional layout and design program. The new version of InDesign will sport many features, including native Mac OS X support, as the company first revealed to MacCentral in an interview earlier this year.
Features of InDesign 2.0 include extensible markup language (XML), import and export support, transparency, table creation, long document support, a new printing interface and tighter integration with other Adobe products.
Adobe says the transparency feature is the first of its kind for page layout software. Users will be able to apply editable drop shadows, feathering and opacity settings to objects, and can place transparent Photoshop, Illustrator and PDF files into InDesign. Users can also turn tab-delimited text into tables or import styled Microsoft Word and Excel tables. 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.
The long document support will allow designers to group related documents into book lists to number pages and generate tables of contents and indexes, according to Adobe. InDesign 2.0 also introduces built-in, extensible support for exporting Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as well as importing and exporting XML files.
Adobe InDesign 2.0 will be available in the first (calendar) quarter of 2002 to customers in the United States and Canada. The estimated street price will be US$699 for the full product with a special 90-day upgrade offer of US$99 (US$149 thereafter). If you purchase InDesign 1.5 on or after September 24, 2001, you can upgrade to InDesign 2.0 for free directly from Adobe (with proof of purchase).