From the course: InDesign 2023 Essential Training

What's new in Adobe InDesign 2023 - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2023 Essential Training

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What's new in Adobe InDesign 2023

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- [Narrator] I want to take a moment to talk about the new features that Adobe released in InDesign 2023. Now, if you've never used InDesign before, this overview of what's new may not be helpful and you can just skip it. But because these features are new and therefore newsworthy I want to at least list them off for you. Okay, what's new in InDesign 2023 also called version 18 of InDesign. First, you can now copy formatted text between Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator. This was a pain point for about 20 years so I'm glad they finally got this working. Second, also in the category of, it's about time, comes the ability to preview documents in the finder on the Mac or Explorer in Windows. In other words, it won't change the file icon itself but if you switch to a view mode like gallery you can see a preview of the page. Third, later on in this course, I'll talk about the pages panel and how it lets you make pages and move them around and stuff. Well, there's a new feature in the pages panel menu for when you're duplicating a page and now it lets you choose whether to put the copy at the end of the document or immediately after the one you're duplicating. It's one of those minor changes that Adobe made which just makes life a little easier. Next, when you paste text in to InDesign from another program, you need to choose whether you want to paste it with or without the formatting. Here, let me switch over to InDesign and I'll show you. Now, there's always been an option for paste or paste without formatting here in the edit menu and in the preferences dialogue box. But now, when you just press command V or control V on Windows, you'll see this little gray button up here in the lower right corner. If you click that, you can choose which one you want. The one on the right is paste with the formatting and the one on the left strips away all the formatting. Now, I don't typically recommend pasting text into InDesign. Instead, as you'll learn later on in the course I recommend people use the place feature, but I get it. Sometimes it's just easier to paste, so now you know what that little gray box means. Okay, the last two new features are significant, auto style and style packs. Adobe added these to InDesign as what they call a technology preview, but I don't cover them at all in this course because, well, to be honest they're seriously broken and they're really annoying, and in my opinion, you should just ignore them until, well I hope they're better in version 19. The basic idea of auto style is good. Auto style takes text with no formatting, and it applies styles like heading and lists and so on. It's using some AI machine learning to automatically format the text, and it's a clever idea, except it hardly ever works, and even worse if you try it on text that already has some formatting like italic or bold or whatever, then it strips off all of that formatting so you lose any of the style information that you probably wanted. Style packs, which shows up as a new panel in InDesign is also an interesting idea because the goal is to let you switch all of your formatting really quickly from one style to another like if you wanted to test out different looks for your document. But again, in all my testing, I found that it just causes more problems than it solves so I can't recommend anyone use this yet especially not beginner users even though that's who Adobe designed it for. Ultimately, you won't actually see most of these features in the following chapters because I'm focusing on what's essential about InDesign. Okay, now that you know what's new, it's time to jump in and focus on what's important, how to use Adobe InDesign.

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