InDesign CS3's speed wows author

I got involved with Macs by way of desktop publishing, laying out my high-school newspaper on a couple of Macintosh Plus machines that ran the System, Aldus PageMaker 1.0 and our files from a single floppy disk.

We laid out pages and printed them on an early Apple LaserWriter, then sliced up the sections as needed and adhered them to layout sheets using hot wax rollers and X-Acto knives.

Today, I'm pretty much doing the same thing but on much better equipment. When I write my books, I also package them, which means I deliver final laid-out and corrected files to the publisher.

Fortunately, the hot wax is gone (though I do miss that old newspaper-production aroma). I've been using Adobe InDesign CS3 steadily since it became available, and the switch from InDesign CS2 for me can be summed up in one word: speed. Largely this is because CS3 is a universal-binary application that runs natively on Intel-based Macs (my primary machine is a 2.33 GHz MacBook Pro); the previous version ran fine, but in emulation using Apple's Rosetta technology.

The entire Creative Suite 3 package has benefited from the increased performance. Most of my books are Visual QuickStart Guides, a Peachpit Press series that takes a step-by-step approach with lots of screenshots and illustrations. So, in addition to working in InDesign, I typically have Photoshop CS3 open at the same time.

After adding some automation to the mix, I've shaved all sorts of time off my workflow. For example, here's a situation that comes up hundreds of times when I'm working on a book project.

First I take a screenshot using Ambrosia Software's excellent SnapzPro X (www.ambrosiasw.com), which enables me to capture individual windows as well as the full screen or rectangular selections. SnapzPro X is set up to dump the image file into a folder of my choice and save it in the TIFF format.

That folder is set up with a Folder Action in the Finder — courtesy of a scripting friend of mine — that checks to see if anything has been added recently. (See www.apple.com/applescript/folderactions/ for more information.) When the TIFF image arrives, the Finder runs a workflow that was created in Apple's Automator application (included with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger).

The workflow does several things: It renames the file (SnapzPro X saves TIFF files with the four-letter .tiff extension, which resulted in files named like "sample.tiff.tif" after being processed through Photoshop); it moves a copy to a separate folder I set up for storing originals; and then it runs the image on a Photoshop Droplet.

The Droplet is a set of Photoshop-specific commands that open the image, convert it to the CMYK color space with a custom color profile, and finally move the converted file to the active folder I'm using to retrieve artwork for the book.

That took a long time to explain, but the process happens in a matter of seconds. In years past, I would have had to do most of that manually, or batch-convert many images at once before placing them in my InDesign document.

Now, in about 15-30 seconds I can take a screenshot and incorporate the proper version in my layout.

InDesign CS3 also offers another small feature that ends up saving a lot of time. If I'm showing a progression of actions in my book, I can take the screenshots, have them converted quickly, and then import them all in one placement operation. Previously, I could import only one image at a time.

After choosing Place from the File menu (or more accurately, pressing Command-D; InDesign is heaven for those who access most commands using the keyboard instead of the mouse — still more time savings), I can select several files in the Place dialog before clicking the Open button. They appear "loaded" in the cursor with numbers indicating how many images remain to be added to the page. Click click click and you've placed three images in their own containers.

Speed isn't measured solely in performance, of course. Adobe has come up with a pretty good solution for minimizing the number of floating palettes onscreen by grouping them all into one long dock. Clicking a category, such as Pages or Swatches displays the appropriate palette and hides the others.

At times this approach is frustrating, because I'm accustomed to having certain palettes visible at all times. But you can drag a palette away from the dock to make it free-floating, and group palettes together into one tabbed palette. For example, I apply paragraph, character and object styles so often (even with keyboard shortcuts set up for the most common ones) that I permanently have the three palettes fused into one floating palette. Again, these approaches make the program faster to work with.

InDesign CS3, like Photoshop, is an incredibly deep program with features that I personally haven't used but are intriguing all the same, such as a dedicated Effects palette, improved long-document handling (though I don't know how it stacks up to the warhorse FrameMaker, which some publishers still use despite it being several years out of date), and the capability to place an entire InDesign file within a file as a template.

I'd play with them now if it weren't for the current looming book deadline. Go Speed Writer!

Jeff Carlson and Glenn Fleishman write the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to carlsoncolumn@mac.com. More Practical Mac columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.