Overview of new features

- [Instructor] Whenever I install a new version of a program that I use all the time, I always wish that it came with a cheat sheet. You know, just a simple list of what are the new menu items and where can I find them. And that's what I want this video to be. This is going to give you an overview of the new stuff in CC2018, and I'll be dealing with each of these items in much more detail in other videos in this title. And I'll also be talking about some interface tweaks and some bug fixes in the next video. But for now, let's go through some of the major new features in CC2018.

Now first of all, there is a major feature that's been removed. Which is unusual, I think, for Adobe to actually remove something. What's gone is the Recent workspace. If you go to the dropdown menu for workspaces, it just says Start. But you'll notice that in CC2017 and earlier, and I'll jump over to CC2017. I have it running, and I left it in a dark interface so it's easier for you to tell which version I'm in. If I come here under Advanced, you'll see, ah, there's a Recent Files workspace.

And if you select it, it shows you a little panel with previews of your recent files, and it would also appear if you chose File, Open. It would pop open. But a lot of people, I guess, went to Preferences, and they turned off show Recent Files. Maybe so many people did that Adobe decided, "Okay, we don't need it anymore." And that's gone, sorry. You can see previews of your recent files in the Start workspace, which is still here. Okay, now let's get to some new stuff that they've added. If I click inside a text frame, and I go to the control panel menu, I come down here.

We'll see something new. Paragraph borders and shading. They've added the ability for us to put borders automatically around paragraphs that move with the paragraph as you edit it, just like they added shading a version or two ago. Another new feature, for especially important if you are setting text in German, is that they've added another language. Like you didn't have enough, you know, five languages, spelling and hyphenation languages for Germany. We have a sixth one, German Austria 2006 Reform.

But actually, all joking aside, the people that I know who speak German and are setting type in German, this is huge. It's a fantastic new dictionary for them. I'll get into that in a little bit more detail later, but I also want to call your attention to the fact that in Preferences, under Dictionary, to go along with that new dictionary, is also the Duden Dictionary of Hyphenation options for German text specifically. Duden apparently is a well-known brand in Germany having to do with dictionaries, and this is a big deal for German speakers, and people who are setting text in German.

Now something else that's new. If I select a text frame, and I go to CC Libraries, there is a new option under the Add Content button, Text. You can now create linked text frames in your CC Libraries from Adobe text frames. Now in CC2017, you could still add text frames to CC Libraries, but you didn't have the text option. Instead, you just had graphic and paragraph style. In the graphic option, and both of these are still there in CC 2018.

The graphic option brings across the text frame, not just as art, but an InDesign snippet, that other InDesign files can read, but nothing was linked, alright. But in CC2018, let me grab it. We have a new option to bring it across as live text that gets uploaded to your CC Libraries space, and that means that it gets linked, so you could drag it into other InDesign documents, and when it's updated in one place, it gets updated in all those places.

And it also works with Adobe Illustrator and hopefully more programs as time goes on. So we'll take a close look at that as well. Other things having to do with text, big deal here, if I click inside a text frame and I go to the Type menu, you come down here, ah, look at that. Insert Endnotes. This is huge. For anybody who sets long documents, yes, footnotes are fantastic, and they're very useful. But a lot of books have endnotes in addition to footnotes, or instead of footnotes. And until CC2018, you had to use scripts or plug-ins or all sorts of work arounds to get automatically numbered endnotes.

Something that Word has been able to do for centuries, I believe. Now we have the feature in InDesign, and we'll spend a lot of time looking at endnotes in this title. There's a little tweak I want to show you. If you go to the Layout menu, and go to Table of Contents, is the fact that you can remove forced line breaks when you're creating ToC. If you have long headlines that are being pulled into your ToC, that you used line breaks in the document, you can remove those in the ToC. I have a little video in the title that shows you exactly what I mean, but this is welcome, for sure.

Okay, and then a larger new feature. Let me select, let's say I'll select this image here. If you go to Object Styles, and I'm going to just go ahead and create a new one with option or alt+click, we have an entirely new attribute that you can save with an object style, size and position options. Woohoo! Yes, you can specify the size of the object, and the position of the object on the page in a style, which means that it's going to be far easier for some of your documents to be quickly laid out, and be much more accurate in making sure that things are in alignment.

This is just a wonderful new feature that people have been asking for for a long time. Now we have two final features I want to mention that have to do with export formats. First, I'll go to File, Export. And let's look at PDF. So if I created a PDF of this document, that's not something that you can see right here, but as long as you leave the default turned on of Create Tagged PDF, in CC2018, Adobe spent a lot of time in making sure that your PDFs are much more accessible to people with visual problems than before.

Yes, InDesign could always create accessible PDFs, but there are a lot of elements in layout that didn't get the correct tags, and you had to do that manually in Acrobat. Well now, InDesign does it on it's own, and we'll take a look at that in a video. And the other export format that I want to talk about is HTML. So if I go to HTML, and click Save. Look here under Advanced, and there's a new option under CSS, not to include classes, which means that you're going to end up with simpler, cleaner HTML without a lot of the classes and IDs that Adobe adds.

This is true for HTML export and also ePub export. You have a fine control of this as well. You can say don't include classes just for some of the styles, which we'll look at in more detail in another video. So there is your cheat sheet, and I hope you enjoyed this quick tour of all the new features in CC2018. I, for one, can't wait to get started using these.