Adobe Indesign CS3

List Price: $699.00 Discount Price: Too low to display

Features:

• The ideal solution for designing professional page layouts using rich creative options
• Boost efficiency through productivity enhancements and tight integration
• Automate workflows and processes, including long-document publishing
• Flexible XML import and export controls and robust scripting support
• Design compelling page layouts that include transparency, creative effects, and gradient feathers

Accessories:
ColorVision Spyder2PRO Win/Mac	ColorVision Spyder2 Suite Win/Mac

Customer Reviews:

Do NOT upgrade if you do books [Posted on 2007-09-26]
If you use InDesign for books requiring indexes, do NOT upgrade to this version. InDesign CS3 (for both Windows and Macs) has serious problems with indexing multi-document books that does not exist in CS2. It drops entries and scrambles page numbers seemingly at random, while giving no warning that something has gone wrong. Any index it produces cannot be trusted. Imagine a publisher printing 50,000 copies of a book with a defective index and you get a sense of just how dreadful this problem is. Adobe could be sued for a flaw this serious.

This bug was reported on Adobe forums back in late April, five months ago. I've talked to Adobe programmers and staff about it. They can't do any more than suggest a script that combines multiple documents into one, where the problem apparently doesn't exist. The real fix is awaiting upper management approval of a "point-release," which must mean the CS3.1 version. But this fix doesn't require a point-release. Every few weeks, Adobe's updater patches CS3 for some trivial reason, typically tweaking Adobe Bridge to sell more stock photos. They could do the same with this dreadful index bug.

Adobe CS3 contains quite a few improvements that make the upgrade worthwhile for most users. But if you create indexes from multidocument books, I suggest you wait until this problem is fixed before upgrading. And if you don't hear otherwise, that means InDesign CS3.1

--Michael W. Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien: A Chronology and Commentary for The Lord of the Rings

Lots of Potential ... but Lethally "Buggy" [Posted on 2007-11-15]
I purchased Adobe InDesign after using Adobe GoLive and being extremely satisfied with the latter's sleek GUI, compatability with Adobe Illustrator and overall ease-of-use. I suspect that Adobe InDesign boasts the same qualities ... if you're actually capable of installing it. I carefully spec'ed the product before buying it to ensure my PC met the requirements and found out that it exceeded the requirements in every way. When I went to install the product, it initialized but would never install ... worse yet, the installer just disappeared and never displayed an error. When I looked on Adobe's website, it stated that "Adobe is aware of the issue and is currently researching the causes." The website proposed some possible fixes; none of which worked in my case.

The folks at Adobe, despite some valiant attempts, could not determine what caused the installation problem and had me attempting to do everything from installing additional RAM (above and beyond the requirements on the packaging specs)to uninstalling and reinstalling Internet Explorer, the whole Adobe suite, and my operating system. After 2 days of back-and-forth support conversations, I finally gave up and returned the product. It seemed incredible that the software did not have a proper installation logging and debugging program. There was a lot of whispering among the tech support representatives that many of the issues were related to Adobe's change in installation procedures with the new installer versions requiring Adobe Flash.

I am a huge Adobe fan ... I have been using Adobe Illustrator and GoLive for several years now and have only positive comments about them. However, if you're going to purchase Adobe InDesign, I recommend you buy the CS2 version until Adobe debugs the CS3 version. Once Adobe straightens out the CS3 version, you could always upgrade ... and the extra cost would certainly be justified by the time savings of trying to debug this quirkly little version.

Not worth upgrading from CS2 [Posted on 2008-03-31]
I have been using this program for the last 4 months and I have to say that I cannot find any reason to upgrade from CS2 to CS3.

First there are a few annoying bugs, the one that affects me the most is that when switching between Adobe products and other windows, eventually InDesign CS3 will simply vanish. It will not be in my taskbar, and it will not show up in the Applications tab of the taskmanager. You have to search for the Process Indesign.exe in the processes tab and kill it before you can restart InDesign CS3 to continue using it.

Also the new palette system is much, much worse than what was used in CS2. In CS2 you could dock the palettes to the side of the application, and when you were not using them you could click on the palettes and they would fold into the side of the program, with just tabs with text labels visible, but easy enough to find an open with a click. You could dock palettes to the left and right of the program, which I did since I use a lot of palettes all the time.

In CS3 the palettes can be docked to the sides, but you cannot dock a palette directly beneath the toolbar. The toolbar has its own "drawer" and any palettes docked on the same side as the toolbar push the toolbar out and make a second drawer, which defeats the purpose of of docking things to the side. Also the nice tabs with text labels have been replaced with little icons, which are just a pain to learn. The toolbar has enough icons, I don't need more palettes with little pictures on them when all I want to to adjust the transparecny of an element. Also another annoying thing is that they changed the "Transparency" palette, which adjusts transparency, into the "Effects" palette. For the first 3 days I thought they had simply removed the ability to adjust transparency since I could not find the transparency palette (which is what this similar palette is called in ALL other Adobe programs.. so much for keeping your interfaces uniform..)


All in all this program is not worth the upgrade. It is buggy, has no new features that are worth anything, and the new palettes are a step backwards in terms of useability.

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