What’s New in InDesign 2019: Things You Will Like and Things You Might Hate

Nothing stays the same. Things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not so much. For a simple list of what's different in InDesign 2019, click here. At our November meeting, Doug Rosen will demonstrate and discuss the changes—and there are a lot of them—so that you can decide which will make your like easier and which you want to avoid.

Location and Parking

The meeting will take place at Blankspaces in downtown Culver City. This is a new location for us. It's a co-working space located upstairs. Press the button downstairs and you will be buzzed in.

Parking meters are active until 6 or 8 p.m. depending on the location. After that you can park on the street free. There is a paid parking structure behind the building at 3846 Cardiff Ave. The first hour is free and each additional 30 minutes is $1 with a maximum of $12. If you park from 6:30 to 10:30 p.m., it would cost $6.

Meeting Notes

By Alvin Takamori

Located in a lively neighborhood near movie theaters and restaurants, Blankspaces was the site of the November 18 meeting of the Los Angeles InDesign User Group. If you survived the traffic and found parking and the meeting location, you entered a modest office space with an open central area. It was here that LAIDUG held their last meeting of 2018.

So what better way to end a year than to look forward to next year. Specifically, what's new in InDesign for 2019. The guest presenter, to cover this topic, was Doug Rosen, project/product manager for Markzware. He rated the new features in InDesign with a thumbs up, or thumbs down.

As it shows in his outline, TypeKit is now called Adobe Fonts. One positive is that in the Control, Properties and Character Panels you can scroll through your font list. You can also preview a font while hovering over the type. If you don't like this feature, it can be turned off under preferences. A new way to sort through fonts is to select a type of font, such as serif fonts.

Working with color fonts, a negative aspect is that when the type is highlighted, you see the font in colors that are opposite of what they actually are. Also, if you want to change the color of an emoji, only some of them can be changed.

As a side note, Doug mentioned that if you need international flags, in the Glyphs Panel you can enter the 2 letter country code to quickly find what you need.

Another new feature in InDesign is Context Aware in the Properties Panel. This means the application recognizes what you are working with. According to whether you are working on text or working on a photo, etc. the options in the Properties Panel automatically change.

Next, Doug talked about PDF forms. There are more options for interactivity, however to maintain these features, a form it has to be exported as an interactive PDF. A regular PDF would lose these new elements.

Imported PDF Comments are limited to working only with InDesign CC 2019 and Annotated using Acrobat. But Markzware has a PDF to InDesign conversion application to get around this.

A new option for placing images is Content Aware Fit. This enables the program to analyze what your content is and fit it into the selected frame. This can be very helpful, especially when handling multiple images. A couple of shortcomings are that a photo taken while rotating the camera might maintain that rotation when it is placed. Also, imported line art can confuse the programs ability to identify where to center an image.

Given the variety of screen sizes on which we consume our digital world, Adjust Layout is a valuable time-saver for content creators. Instead of trying to design a separate layout for each potential output size, Adjust Layout automatically changes and repositions elements of a design layout depending on the output size and some parameters that can be set in advance. You can setup gutters, columns, and bleeds and control what area to restrict an element to. There's an Adjust Font Size option, which can be turned on or off. If turned on, limits can be set on how big or small the font can be.

Space Between Paragraphs is a new choice that can be made, separate from Space Before and Space After. It's useful to reduce the number of different Paragraph Styles you might need to create for something like a list.

There are more new features, but these are all covered in Doug Rosen's outline, which you can access here.

Due to the limited hours at Blankspace, we skipped an intermission and ended the meeting earlier than usual. I don't think anyone minded going home early.

Farthest Attendee

The bona fide LAIDUG member who travels the farthest specifically to attend the meeting will receive her or his choice of any one deal at MightyDeals up to $50.00. You need to prove to us that you traveled farthest to attend this meeting. Having recently moved to the area from somewhere else won't cut it. Be prepared to show us indication of your current residence—perhaps a driver's license or a utility bill. Decision of the administrators of the Los Angeles InDesign User Group is final. Winner — Victoria Markle

Raffles

LAIDUG meetings are free. The group is supported by raffles of donated prizes. No one is required to participate in the raffles. Raffle tickets are: 1 for $3, 2 for $5, 5 for $10, 11 for $20, 24 for $40, 32 for $50 and 65 for $100. All major credit cards are accepted.

Raffle Prizes and Winners

Markzware. Any single product. 12 month subscription. Value $199.00 Winner — Wayne Deselle (FC)
Choose one from the list below:
Q2ID (Quark to InDesign), Convert and open QuarkXPress files in InDesign.
PDF2DTP (PDF to InDesign), Convert PDF files to InDesign.
ID2Q (InDesign to Quark), Convert and open InDesign documents in QuarkXPress.
MT (Markzware), Convert InDesign documents to IDML files readable by InDesign CS4 through CC 2017.
FC (FlightCheck), Check native and PDF files for printing quality.

Expo Creative Asset Manager for Mac from Insider Software. Value $149.00 Winner — Cheryl Stevens
Digital asset manager that allows you to view, tag, search and manage images, icons, fonts, audio, video, app documents.

Font Agent Pro 8 from Insider Software. Value $99.95 Winner — Victoria Markle
Windows font management that allows you to organize, distribute and control your fonts.

InMotion Hosting. Web hosting and free domain. Value $90.00 Winner — Kerry Seal
Web hosting company.

DTP Tools Cloud for InDesign. 6 month subscription. Value $77.40 Winner — Jeff Marcus
Suite of 14 different InDesign productivity tools.

Multi-Find/Change 3.0 from Automatication. Value $49.95 Winner — Victoria Markle
Extension for InDesign and InCopy that allows you to manage and execute Find/Change queries in batches rather than one at a time.

Adobe Stock. 15 image licenses. Value $44.00 Winner — Greg Wertz
Royalty-free, high-quality photos, videos, and illustrations.

InDesign Magazine. 6 month subscription. Value $30.00 Winner — Cheryl Y. White
Monthly PDF publication devoted to InDesign how-tos, in-depth features, and quick tips.

LA Web Professionals Group meeting tickets. Value $7.99 (four raffles) Winners — Rocie Carrillo, Janet Gervers, Dave Snow, Bing Wong
Adobe user group that meets monthly with an emphasis on web design, marketing and the latest internet trends.

About the Presenter

Doug Rosen

Doug Rosen has been involved in the prepress world since the mid-1980s, starting out as a field service engineer and trainer. He later worked in the trenches for a busy printing company in prepress and training. He has been with Markzware for the past 16 years and is currently a project/product manager.