Many word processors moonlight as page layout programs, but there's no substitute for the real thing. Dedicated design programs give you precise control over page layout, typography, and graphics, to help you produce a clean, professional-looking product.

InDesign was designed for graphics professionals, so its cost and learning curve may be a bit daunting for home office and small business users. If you're not a graphics professional, you may find it difficult to justify InDesign's upfront cost. But if you produce more than a few documents a year, and you want the documents to look good, then InDesign may be well worth both its price and its learning curve.

Two new features were designed to save time and enhance consistency between related publications. The Snippets feature, also found in GoLive, lets you save part of a document, such as a text block, or text and a graphic, and reuse it in other InDesign documents. Formatting is preserved, so you won't need to reformat the same elements every time you use them. The new Object Styles feature lets you select, save, and apply a wide range of graphics, text, and frame-level attributes, such as drop shadows, borders, transparency, text wrap, and paragraph styles.

Also new in this version are the ability to import or export multi-page PDF documents, the ability to repeat transformations, such as scale or skew, on the same or different objects, and a new Adobe Help Center.

InDesign CS 2 offers better support for importing Microsoft Word documents, including the ability to map styles in Word documents to styles in InDesign documents. InDesign CS 2 is backwards compatible with InDesign CS, so you can easily share files with colleagues who haven't upgraded to the new version.

If you're an existing PageMaker user who has been reluctant to make the switch, the special upgrade price of $349 may be enough to knock you off the fence. InDesign offers a number of features that are similar to PageMaker, as well as similar palettes, so the adjustment may not be as painful as you anticipate.

Pro: A number of new or improved features make InDesign an indispensable collection of publishing tools. Improved integration with other Adobe products, including GoLive, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Improved support for importing Microsoft Word documents.
Con: Expensive. Fairly steep learning curve for non-designers.

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