InDesign CC 2014 review: Better e-book tools, easier workflows

In reviews of previous versions of InDesign, the looming question was always, “Is this version worth the cost of the upgrade or can I skip it?” But with Adobe’s switch to the Creative Cloud subscription model, this question is meaningless. Every subscriber receives the latest version as soon as it’s available.

Based on the quality of updates released since Creative Cloud was launched a little over a year ago, the result of Adobe’s subscription model seems to be good for customers. Bolstered by the confidence that they’ll receive your ongoing upgrade dollars, Adobe is spending less time developing shiny new features intended to entice customers to pay for an upgrade. Instead, they seem to be focusing on improving the real-world usefulness of InDesign. InDesign CC 2014 has giant improvements for ePub book producers and lots of long-overdue improvements to meat-and-potatoes features such as creating tables, hyperlinks, footnotes, scaling effects, packaging of project files and printing to PDF printers.

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Adobe releases free font: Source Han Sans

In celebration of its 25th year of typeface development, Adobe has released Source Han Sans, a new family of free, open source fonts that harmonizes East Asian and Latin font designs. More than three years in the making, this is one of Adobe’s most complex font projects, requiring cooperation among five different companies to accurately represent the more than 65,000 glyphs (characters) required for typesetting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) languages.

multi language sample

East Asian fonts, which serve approximately 1/4 of the world’s population, are historically based on Chinese ideograms. They’re also large, complex and expensive—with far fewer style choices available than western fonts. Because of the huge scope of this project, Adobe worked with Google and three other companies to spread the work and utilize specific regional expertise. The result is the largest open source font ever created.

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