Soon.

I was recently on a flight one aisle back and across from someone (apparently an Adobe employee) who had a PDF open with the title Creative Suite 4 Pricing Structure. Sadly the rest of the type was too small (and rendered by PDF reader) so I couldn't read it. Sorry :-(

Lots of info, but not willing to get fired to tell you about it.

However, if you wait 15 days....

T

Oh no, another upgrade yet?

Héctor

Torture.

All ideas, theories and statements are subject to change without notice.

I just bought Photoshop last month and now you want more money from me Thomas?

Edit: Sorry, saw the CS4 and thought it was all programs!

Michael

I’m chomping at the bit for this one. The last iterations of Photoshop and Illustrator I’m still angry about, but Indesign just keeps getting better!

Michael:

Creative Suite 4 *is* all programs. At least, all the Creative Suite programs. InDesign CS4 will get announced and presumably shipped at the same time as the rest. It's just that the original poster was particularly interested in InDesign.

Also, if you want to give the money to me personally, feel free. But I expect you'll give it to some retailer. :)

Cheers,

T

> I just bought Photoshop last month

Michael, I think the release should happen somewhere between December 2008 & April 2009; I think :)

Thomas, What about Photoshop (Mac)? For now only a 32bit version?

@David: That's what Photoshop product manager John Nack has said on his blog.

Cheers,

T

Well, it seems to me the new features of ID CS4 are pretty much all workflow related -- useful for medium to large publishing units but not so much for small desktop publishers. In there anything new at all in the area of typography?

These new big-workflow features of CS4 are pretty impressive, especially compared to what we got in CS2 and CS3. But what I really want to see are lists of bugfixes for the Mac versions of Photoshop and Illustrator!

crossing fingers to see Glyph palette everywhere....

crossing fingers to see Glyph palette everywhere....

And global kerns!

> Glyph palette everywhere....
And global kerns!

It still didn't happen this time around :^(((

>> Glyph palette everywhere....

>It still didn’t happen this time around :^(((

Mr Nack is treating us all like a 7yr old child constantly asking him for a pony - he can afford to buy us the pony but he finds our complaints entertaining. So no pony! Wah!

What’s new in the upcoming InDesign CS5? :^)

They are trying to beat down big Quark plataforms on newspapers and publishing houses.

I would only like being able to paste directly from illustrator to indesign without funky shit happening on my drawings.

Héctor

I would only like being able to paste directly from illustrator to indesign without funky shit happening on my drawings.

Yeah, the stupid groups and clipping paths that happen when pasting between the two are pretty horrible. Not to mention what happens when I try pasting text back and forth… Maybe I’ll write up a feature request in the morning. Hell, I’ll just keep focusing on my dream of being a type designer so that one day I don’t have a reason to paste anything between CS apps.

> What’s new in the upcoming InDesign CS5? :^)

CS5 apps have actually been a focus of my attention for months now. Honestly.

So I have kind of a weird time horizon relative to non Adobe people, having been working on the stuff for the version *after* the version that was not yet been announced... it gets kind of surreal, actually.

There is one significant unannounced thing in CS4, though, on the international side. I'm trying to figure out the best way and timing to talk about it.

T

such teases

Here are some text-related items that are in CS4. I was told this morning that due to the announcement, we are allowed to go public with this kind of information. This list contains some trivial & some larger features. I have definitely forgot some. Also, I will discuss the large feature the Thomas is hinting about in the build forum.

* Automatically & dynamically format text matching GREP expressions with character styles. (An extension of Nested Styles.)
* Automatically apply character styles to lines -- like: Apply "smallcap style" to first 2 lines of the paragraph.
* Text cross-references (cross document & single document)
* Conditional text
* Stroke join & miter for outlined text
* Automatic addition/deletion of pages when frames go overset / empty.

etc.

Applying character styles to specific lines of text? That sounds very nice - definitely seeing that being extremely useful.

But it appears that the universe will cease to exist about the time Photoshop gets a glyph palette... /jk

Info on fonts bundled with CS4:
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2008/09/cs4_fonts.html

Cheers,

T

Thanks a lot, Thomas!

the CS4 font list looks a lot like CS3

Well, I guess that’s good news for those who don’t have CS3 …

a new registration inventive: the complete Sanvito Pro family

Definitely a beauty! Though: Myself, I would have preferred a Hypatia Sans Italic.

-- And global kerns!
-- It still didn’t happen this time around :^(((

That's sad.

We thought about making the reg incentive the complete Hypatia Sans family, including the italics. But our consensus was that this would not have a strong appeal to most folks who got CS3, that they wouldn't see the italics as a big bonus.

I have now fixed my typo in my blog post ("inventive" > "incentive"). Oops.

T

fixed my typo
Didn’t even notice. Sorry for quoting it. ;-)

Thomas: Thanks for the information. What about offering a choice upon registration?

1. Arno Pro
2. Hypatia Sans Pro
3. Sanvito Pro
4. Warnock Pro
5. Brioso Pro

etc...

It would be good to think about those for whom CS4 might be a first purchase, not just about those who already had CS2 and then upgraded to CS3 and now will be upgrading to CS4.

I'm quite surprised Arno Pro is not being included in CS4, especially since it's such a beauty.

Rahim

Folks already have a choice of registration incentives, but a typeface is just one of many choices. It's a little late to change this now - the registration incentives are finalized many months in advance.

Arno was a one-time bonus, as we've done with several new typefaces before it.

However, folks who *really* want one of the other typefaces can always license them separately! Hypatia Sans should be ready "early next year" with the italics.

Regards,

T

Was anyone else surprised to see that Adobe still hasn’t dropped version cue? I really want a version of Creative Suite with no Version Cue and a lower price.

Is there any difference in opentype support? Mostly, both one to many and many to one substitution?

ChrisL

Still no global kerns? Oh man!!!

OK, I'll bite. What's a global kern? Like changing a sidebearing?

Sort of. But only for certain letter pairings. Like: you find the ‘Ta’ combination in your font ‘overkerned’, i.e. too narrow. Plus, you don’t have a font editor at hand (or don’t want to/can’t fix the font itself, for whatever reason). In such a scenario (which happens all the time), it would be great not having to go through the doc and fix those instances by tinkering around with local kerns, character styles or white-space.

Quark has "kerning tables" which allow you to adjust the kerning in poorly kerned fonts. You do it once and the pairs stay kerned both throughout the document and whenever you use the font (in Quark). InDesign has no such feature, so that you have to manually kern the same pairs every time you use them. Obviously this is not a problem in fonts that are well kerned, but unfortunately they are not all so. I had hoped Adobe would put this feature into this upgrade. As Thomas explained it, the reason the feature hasn't been incorporated yet is that they want to make sure it works across all the CS applications. I argue that Illustrator and P-shop are not typesetting/layout programs to begin with, and that this feature would matter most to users of InDesign.

To me, while overall I prefer InDesign, this is really a glaring oversight. See this thread:

http://typophile.com/node/7608

> Is there any difference in opentype support?

In terms of features and lookuptypes supported there is no difference, AFAIK.

> Mostly, both one to many and many to one substitution?

Many-to-one (a.k.a GSUB LookupType 4) has been supported since the beginning. That's how you get ligatures, for example.
One-to-many (a.k.a GSUB LookupType 2) is not yet supported. On the other hand, the upcoming AFDKO will support this looktype for the first time.

Thanks, Miguel!

Looks like nothing worth the upgrade fee for me at least.

ChrisL

Dez, I upgrade every time so I don't have to pay extra to jump a version.

But does the cost of 2 upgrades come out to less than one upgrade plus version "jump"?
I guess I am, against all odds, hoping that a few folks who don't upgrade because there are no typographic upgrades in the CS4 will give Adobe a hint that type is important too. I just hate rewarding the CS Suite division for ignoring long needed improvements in typography. No glyph palette in Photoshop is pathetically inexcusable. Why should I pay them for ignoring us? I know I am whizzing into the wind by thinking my non-upgrade will make a bit of difference to the MBAs who make the decisions. They see us as small potatoes. Adobe has gone from a company who were passionate about their products and customers to being just another big corporate bureaucracy just lost in boardroom humdrum and out of touch with what made them successful to begin with. Warnock actually gave a damn and gave Adobe a soul. Now, all it has is a balance sheet.

ChrisL

I'm planning to skip this one unless I need it to work with a client. Some of the features would be a little useful, but the only one I can see being $399 (difference between upgrading twice and once with version jump) worth of useful is the ability to handle complex scripts like Arabic without the ME version, and from what Eric and Thomas said in the other thread, it doesn't really sound all that ready for use yet. Though if somebody gives me a book to set that has hundreds of cross-references and an author that keeps changing stuff around, that might convince me to cough up the money :)

@Thomas:

I think I now know what the "one significant unannounced thing [...] on the international side" is that you were talking about: support for the OpenType feature of automatically converting between simplified and traditional Chinese.

Honestly, I didn't even know this cool feature (and many more regarding CJK scripts, it seems) exists in the OT spec. Do you know when it was introduced? Any way, this feature is certainly very useful, and as someone who's highly interested in CJK typography, I know it's a quite significant advancement from the technical point of view, too.

Can you tell us what other OT features are implemented for the first time in ID CS4? And what, in your opinion, is the most important CJK OT feature that hasn't been implemented yet?

Actually, the "locale" ('locl') feature is already supported in InDesign CS3.

I was referring to some complex script stuff that is NOT officially supported, as discussed in another typophile thread on Indic support in CS4.

Also new:

- Flash Player 10 support for quite a few OpenType features. Nothing new in Flash Pro CS4 as far as I know.

- previewed last year and being shown in depth at MAX next month: a coming ActionScript text library component that supports lots of OpenType and other text goodness in Flash, including major world languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Indic/Dravidian languages, etc.). This builds on the new capabilities of Flash Player 10.

- Fireworks CS4 ability to paste in Illustrator and Photoshop text with OT features applied and retain them with apporpriate glyphs, as live text.

I am particularly excited about the Flash stuff, though the Fireworks bit is pretty nice.

T

"locl" is supported in ID CS3? Do you mean supported internally by the typographic engine or actually accessible to the users? If the latter: where?

Also, it seems I can't find this other thread you're talking about. Can you point it out to me, please?

As I have understood it, the culture-specific character sets in Studio Lettering by House Industries are triggered by the locl feature. That is, you can access them in ID CS3 by assigning a language.

This is what Tal Leming says about the code involved (the culture-specific alternates represent only a fractional amount):
We really crashed into the edge of the OpenType universe and I have the scars to prove it.

I reckon the other thread is this one: Does Indesign CS4 support Indic scripts?

First, the English version of ID CS3 doesn't even provide "Chinese" (let alone variants of it) as an language option. Second, script is -- at least partially -- independent of language.

Chinese Traditional, Japanese, and Korean are available as options for "Language" in an English ID5 file that actually contains characters for all three; I imagine I'd get Chinese Simplified if I added something in an appropriate font. If I open a brand new ID5 file, I get lots of other options, but no CJK. I'd like to see a language "pinyin" so that pinyin romanization would hyphenate properly without manual intervention.

Sorry, I don't get any CJK language option in any ID5 file -- no matter if there is already CJK text in it or not.

Are there education discounts for upgrades? I don't see any upgrade options in the education store.

Well I'll be blowed. If I use Vista's PRC Chinese IME to type Chinese into a new English-language ID5 file, I do not get the Chinese Simplified language attribute. I assume English ID5 handles typed Chinese Trad., Japanese and Korean similarly. So where did I get the CJK language attributes I've been putting in character styles for all three languages all these years? The attributes come in with MS Word files, either via "place" or pasting from the clipboard: so long as I don't have ID strip text attributes, Word's language attributes are among those that survive transfer. Thus ID5 may not "provide" the Chinese attribute, but I didn't notice. I can use CJK attributes in English-language ID, and that's what matters to me.

Come to think of it, perhaps it's just as well Adobe doesn't provide the attributes. I always warn friends not to install the CJK input methods unless they really want to use them because it is surprisingly easy to think your keyboard has gone into the ozone when all you've done is accidentally hit the key combination turning on Chinese input.