Adobe InDesign CS3 Bible

A flurry of utility programs, specialized software, fonts, and plug-ins can help you complete your specific publishing environment. The following items detail some of the more outstanding ones:

• An image editor: Almost all publishers need an image editor, and the standard is really Adobe Photoshop (for both Macintosh and Windows). Even if you're more of an editor, you'll be surprised at how often you'll need to open a graphic file in Photoshop to simply crop or edit a photograph. For professional work, get the full version. If you really just need to resize and crop photos and other images, you can get by with the much cheaper LE version.

• An illustration program: If you draw, or you need to edit EPS files, you need an illustration program such as CorelDraw, Adobe Illustrator, or Macromedia FreeHand. They're all good cross-platform programs, so try them out first to see what feels best to you. All three companies let you download demo versions from their Web sites.

  Cross-Reference ‚

  Go to www.INDDcentral.com for easy links to these and other software demos

• A word processor: A word processing program is a must. Microsoft Word is the standard, but many still use WordPerfect ‚ it's up to you. If you use WordPerfect, I recommend you save your InDesign-destined files in Word format.

• A font manager: See the next section, "Working with Fonts," for more information.

• A compression utility: Files are always too big, so compression utilities are a must. Here are two of the more common ones:

  • StuffIt Deluxe: On the Mac, there's no substitute for Aladdin Systems's StuffIt Deluxe, a $50 utility package that reads both Mac .sit files and PC .zip files, as well as several Internet compression formats. Aladdin also has a Windows version of StuffIt.

  • WinZip: On Windows, the equivalent program to StuffIt Deluxe is the $30 shareware program WinZip, from Niko Mac Computing.

• Plug-ins: You'll probably want add-on programs, known as plug-ins, for InDesign that extend its capabilities.

  Cross-Reference ‚

  See Chapter 36 and this book's companion Web site www.INDDcentral.com for comprehensive coverage of plug-ins.