Adobe Indesign CS3 Upgrade from Pagemaker

List Price: $199.00 Discount Price: $195.99

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 Spyder2 Suite Win/Mac	ColorVision Spyder2PRO Win/Mac

Customer Reviews:

Installation Problems Prevent a Review... [Posted on 2007-06-27]
I would love to review Adobe InDesign CS3, but I can't get the program to install on my new Vista system. Adobe technical support requested that I send them a conguration file, but its been almost a week and I haven't received a call back. Having used PageMaker for years, I look forward to using InDesign, but Adobe obviously needs to make some improvements.

moving up to InDesign CS3 [Posted on 2007-07-12]
I've been a long term PageMaker user and owned every version from 1.0 upwards to 7.0. So it was always going to be a hard thing to make the change to anything else. I bought InDesign mainly because I was getting problems with the more demanding DTP jobs that required separations, as well as feeling that more of what I created separately in Corel really ought to have been part of my main layout program. However, within a week of starting to use InDesign, I feel quite at home. There's enough carry-through to make life seem familiar, but loads of new intuitive functionality. It's early days, so I'm sure I'll find some limitations later, but they haven't appeared yet.

Still struggling [Posted on 2007-08-02]
I have been a PageMaker user FOREVER beginning on my little Mac back in the 1980s (I am now on a Dell). I hated to give it up but when I lost the ability to save my PageMaker 7.0 files as pdf (thanks to installing and then removing a trial version of Adobe Professional 8) I had to switch. The company who prints my 40 page bi-monthly agriculture magazine said it was about time!

Yes, there are some similarities between PM and ID but there are so many "bells and whistles" in ID that I will definately need to be trained on this program. I converted my PM file with very little problem (a few font issues but fixable once I found instructions on Adobe's Web site) and do find a few things in ID nice to use (i.e., the gradiant feature). I guess my middle of the road rating is that the learning curve is a little higher than with PM. I also miss some things in PM that ID doesn't appear to do, but they're minor touches I had grown accustomed to over the years.

One warning...it is a memory hog for sure! It is slow to load (I have 1 GB of RAM running on a 1.86 GHz Pentium processor Dell laptop) and bogs the computer at times when running other programs with it (i.e., Photoshop).

I am optimistic, though, that I will come to enjoy ID almost as much as I loved PM (I even tried using QuarkExpress many, many times and always came back to PM)! Good luck!

Don't 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. That's why I gave it three stars rather than five. 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

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