The March 2018 and October 2017 releases of InDesign CC focuses on improving the user experience with more control over commonly used features and workflows. Read on for a quick introduction to these features and links to resources offering more information.
For a summary of features introduced in earlier releases of InDesign CC, see Feature summary | earlier releases.
New in the March 2018 releaseYou can now create borders that enclose multiple paragraphs using Paragraph Border feature. Select Merge Consecutive Borders And Shading With Same Settings option while creating a paragraph border to merge the paragraph borders of two consecutive paragraphs, if they have same paragraph border and shading properties.
For more information, see Format paragraphs.
Now you can track analytics, such as read time, average read time, and device breakup of user views for each Publish Online document.
You now have an option to use Photoshop or Illustrator keyboard shortcuts in InDesign. If you have Illustrator or Photoshop installed on your system, you will also get a message to use Photoshop or Illustrator shortcuts when you launch InDesign and create a new document.
To select Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop shortcuts or to revert to InDesign default shortcuts, go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts.
Now, while exporting an InDesign document as PDF, you have an option to create separate PDFs for each page or spread. Select Create Separate PDF Files while exporting as Adobe PDF.
For more information, see Dynamic PDF documents.
New presets for mobile and tablet have been added in the New Document dialog. You can now use mobile presets for iPhone X, iPhone 8, Google Pixel, and more.
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While creating a cross-reference, you can search a particular paragraph from the list of paragraphs with the help of a search bar. The following types of search are supported:
- Search from start - Match the sequence from the beginning of the paragraph.
- Search anywhere - Match the sequence from anywhere in the paragraph.
You can now add endnotes and quickly reference annotations within long documents. You can either insert endnotes in the document or in a story, a single endnote frame is created for the document. You can also control the numbering, formatting, and layout of the endnotes. The numbering auto-adjusts based on the rearrangements of the endnotes in the text.
Now, you can also import a word document having endnotes using import option. All the endnotes are imported and added in a new text frame.
For more information, see Endnotes.
Paragraph border enables you to create a border around one or more paragraphs. You can customize corner designs to highlight the paragraph with beautiful effects.
For more information, see Format paragraphs.
Set and modify object size and position across pages in a document with Object Styles. Easily resize the width and height and reposition multiple objects across a document using Object Styles.
The Object Style dialog box now provides an option to choose and set the desired values for position (X and Y coordinates) and size (height and width) for an object.
This option is available as Size and Position Options in Object Style Options dialog.
There are three options available for size:
- Width only
- Height only
- Height & Width
You can modify height and width based on the selection made from these options.
For example, if you choose Width only then you can modify width only. The option to modify height will be unavailable.
Similarly, there are three options available for position:
- X only
- Y only
- X and Y
You can modify X and Y based on the selection made from these options.
For example, if you choose X only then you can modify X only. The option to modify Y will be unavailable.
You can also apply size and position of an object to other object by using the Eyedropper tool. Double click the Eyedropper tool and select Transform Options (disabled by default). Now, if you click any object, the Eyedropper tool also picks the size and position of the object which can then be applied to any other object.
Duden, a trusted German brand for dictionaries, is now integrated natively in InDesign. Now, you can use Duden for more accurate German hyphenation and spell checking.
For more information, see Duden dictionary.
Now, you can add text objects from your InDesign documents to Creative Cloud libraries and then share them with other users and across applications. Text assets in a library retain the character/paragraph styles and other attributes originally applied to them. You can reuse text assets in libraries across InDesign or Illustrator documents. However, if a text object has effects and appearances applied to it, you must add it to the library as a graphics asset to preserve them.
For more information, see Creative Cloud libraries in InDesign.
Enhanced in the October 2017 releaseWhile searching for fonts, you can narrow down the results by filtering fonts by classification, such as Serif, Sans Serif, and Handwritten.
You can also search for fonts based on visual similarity. Fonts closest in visual appearance to the font you're searching for appear on top of the search results. A status strip in the font menu displays the information about the applied filters.
For more information, see Organize and filter fonts.
In this release of InDesign CC several enhancements have been made in PDF accessibility at export. Following tagging support has been introduced in PDF exports.
Alt-Txt:
Earlier, you couldn't tag InDesign native objects and graphics as figures. Now, the alternate text added to graphics is exported to tagged PDF and the corresponding alternate text is read by screen reader for the graphics.
Group level tagging:
InDesign now supports group level tags when alt-text is provided to a group. You can now add alt-text to a grouped entity in InDesign and it is tagged as a figure in the exported PDF.
Anchored text frames and anchored groups tagging:
Support for anchored objects tagging, which was not available earlier, has been added. Now, you get tags for anchored text frames and anchored groups in exported PDF.
Master pages tagging
Any page object on master page is not tagged in exported PDF and has an artifact tag in contents panel of Acrobat. Overriding master page items shows the tags of page items in exported PDF.
Index tagging:
Earlier, you were able to create index but the index tag was not exported to PDF. Now, this can be done and index tagging, which was previously role mapped to paragraph, is now mapped to index only.
List tag language:
Earlier, list tag language was set to English by default in the exported PDF. Now, the correct list language gets exported in the tagged PDF as set by the user.
List tagging:
Earlier, nested list tag structure was contained in LBody of primary list which was read incorrectly. Now, the correct structure of nested list tagging is implemented.
Caption tagging:
InDesign now supports Live Caption tagging. Figure captioned with live caption gets a caption tag as a child of figure tag.
TOC:
Support for TOC tagging structure is implemented, which was previously mapped to paragraph tagging. Also, now it is mandatory for a TOC containing hyperlinks to have tags.
Now, there is an option in the HTML export dialog which tells InDesign to not include classes in the HTML. It removes the class and id attributes present in the tag during HTML Export. Any redundant div tags present in the HTML are also removed to provide a clean looking HTML and remove unnecessary grouping of content.
For more information, see Export content to HTML.
Now, while creating a document in MENA (Middle East and North Africa) version of InDesign, instead of beginning with a blank document, you can choose from a wide variety of templates which were earlier available for Roman feature set.only. This includes Arabic, Hebrew, and French (Morocco) locales.
To access the new dialog, do one of the following:
- Select File > New.
- Use the following keyboard shortcut:
- (Mac) Cmd+N
- (Windows) Ctrl+N
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