I was recently on a flight one aisle back and across from someone (apparently an Adobe employee) who had a PDF open with the title Creative Suite 4 Pricing Structure. Sadly the rest of the type was too small (and rendered by PDF reader) so I couldn't read it. Sorry :-(

Oh no, another upgrade yet?

Héctor

I just bought Photoshop last month and now you want more money from me Thomas?

Edit: Sorry, saw the CS4 and thought it was all programs!

Michael

Michael:

Creative Suite 4 *is* all programs. At least, all the Creative Suite programs. InDesign CS4 will get announced and presumably shipped at the same time as the rest. It's just that the original poster was particularly interested in InDesign.

Also, if you want to give the money to me personally, feel free. But I expect you'll give it to some retailer. :)

Cheers,

T

@David: That's what Photoshop product manager John Nack has said on his blog.

Cheers,

T

These new big-workflow features of CS4 are pretty impressive, especially compared to what we got in CS2 and CS3. But what I really want to see are lists of bugfixes for the Mac versions of Photoshop and Illustrator!

crossing fingers to see Glyph palette everywhere....

And global kerns!

>> Glyph palette everywhere....

>It still didn’t happen this time around :^(((

Mr Nack is treating us all like a 7yr old child constantly asking him for a pony - he can afford to buy us the pony but he finds our complaints entertaining. So no pony! Wah!

They are trying to beat down big Quark plataforms on newspapers and publishing houses.

I would only like being able to paste directly from illustrator to indesign without funky shit happening on my drawings.

Héctor

> What’s new in the upcoming InDesign CS5? :^)

CS5 apps have actually been a focus of my attention for months now. Honestly.

So I have kind of a weird time horizon relative to non Adobe people, having been working on the stuff for the version *after* the version that was not yet been announced... it gets kind of surreal, actually.

There is one significant unannounced thing in CS4, though, on the international side. I'm trying to figure out the best way and timing to talk about it.

T

Here are some text-related items that are in CS4. I was told this morning that due to the announcement, we are allowed to go public with this kind of information. This list contains some trivial & some larger features. I have definitely forgot some. Also, I will discuss the large feature the Thomas is hinting about in the build forum.

* Automatically & dynamically format text matching GREP expressions with character styles. (An extension of Nested Styles.)
* Automatically apply character styles to lines -- like: Apply "smallcap style" to first 2 lines of the paragraph.
* Text cross-references (cross document & single document)
* Conditional text
* Stroke join & miter for outlined text
* Automatic addition/deletion of pages when frames go overset / empty.

etc.

Info on fonts bundled with CS4:
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2008/09/cs4_fonts.html

Cheers,

T

-- And global kerns!
-- It still didn’t happen this time around :^(((

That's sad.

fixed my typo
Didn’t even notice. Sorry for quoting it. ;-)

Folks already have a choice of registration incentives, but a typeface is just one of many choices. It's a little late to change this now - the registration incentives are finalized many months in advance.

Arno was a one-time bonus, as we've done with several new typefaces before it.

However, folks who *really* want one of the other typefaces can always license them separately! Hypatia Sans should be ready "early next year" with the italics.

Regards,

T

Is there any difference in opentype support? Mostly, both one to many and many to one substitution?

ChrisL

OK, I'll bite. What's a global kern? Like changing a sidebearing?

Quark has "kerning tables" which allow you to adjust the kerning in poorly kerned fonts. You do it once and the pairs stay kerned both throughout the document and whenever you use the font (in Quark). InDesign has no such feature, so that you have to manually kern the same pairs every time you use them. Obviously this is not a problem in fonts that are well kerned, but unfortunately they are not all so. I had hoped Adobe would put this feature into this upgrade. As Thomas explained it, the reason the feature hasn't been incorporated yet is that they want to make sure it works across all the CS applications. I argue that Illustrator and P-shop are not typesetting/layout programs to begin with, and that this feature would matter most to users of InDesign.

To me, while overall I prefer InDesign, this is really a glaring oversight. See this thread:

http://typophile.com/node/7608

Thanks, Miguel!

Looks like nothing worth the upgrade fee for me at least.

ChrisL

But does the cost of 2 upgrades come out to less than one upgrade plus version "jump"?
I guess I am, against all odds, hoping that a few folks who don't upgrade because there are no typographic upgrades in the CS4 will give Adobe a hint that type is important too. I just hate rewarding the CS Suite division for ignoring long needed improvements in typography. No glyph palette in Photoshop is pathetically inexcusable. Why should I pay them for ignoring us? I know I am whizzing into the wind by thinking my non-upgrade will make a bit of difference to the MBAs who make the decisions. They see us as small potatoes. Adobe has gone from a company who were passionate about their products and customers to being just another big corporate bureaucracy just lost in boardroom humdrum and out of touch with what made them successful to begin with. Warnock actually gave a damn and gave Adobe a soul. Now, all it has is a balance sheet.

ChrisL

@Thomas:

I think I now know what the "one significant unannounced thing [...] on the international side" is that you were talking about: support for the OpenType feature of automatically converting between simplified and traditional Chinese.

Honestly, I didn't even know this cool feature (and many more regarding CJK scripts, it seems) exists in the OT spec. Do you know when it was introduced? Any way, this feature is certainly very useful, and as someone who's highly interested in CJK typography, I know it's a quite significant advancement from the technical point of view, too.

Can you tell us what other OT features are implemented for the first time in ID CS4? And what, in your opinion, is the most important CJK OT feature that hasn't been implemented yet?

"locl" is supported in ID CS3? Do you mean supported internally by the typographic engine or actually accessible to the users? If the latter: where?

Also, it seems I can't find this other thread you're talking about. Can you point it out to me, please?

First, the English version of ID CS3 doesn't even provide "Chinese" (let alone variants of it) as an language option. Second, script is -- at least partially -- independent of language.

Sorry, I don't get any CJK language option in any ID5 file -- no matter if there is already CJK text in it or not.

Well I'll be blowed. If I use Vista's PRC Chinese IME to type Chinese into a new English-language ID5 file, I do not get the Chinese Simplified language attribute. I assume English ID5 handles typed Chinese Trad., Japanese and Korean similarly. So where did I get the CJK language attributes I've been putting in character styles for all three languages all these years? The attributes come in with MS Word files, either via "place" or pasting from the clipboard: so long as I don't have ID strip text attributes, Word's language attributes are among those that survive transfer. Thus ID5 may not "provide" the Chinese attribute, but I didn't notice. I can use CJK attributes in English-language ID, and that's what matters to me.

Come to think of it, perhaps it's just as well Adobe doesn't provide the attributes. I always warn friends not to install the CJK input methods unless they really want to use them because it is surprisingly easy to think your keyboard has gone into the ozone when all you've done is accidentally hit the key combination turning on Chinese input.