In mid October 2023, I’d published my first parody article to Colecandoo titled “New features in InDesign 2024, and about time too!”. It was inspired by my frustration both at the lack of new features that were implemented into InDesign 2024; and a presentation at that year’s Adobe MAX by the InDesign team titled “What’s New in InDesign” that demonstrated a lot of features that have existed (some for over a decade), but not a lot of new ones. I’d written a follow-up piece as the next Colecandoo post that went into more detail about my motivations.
So frustrated was I at the time that I’d considered posting the following meme, but held back and instead went in the parody direction. Anyway, enough time has now passed that I can post the meme.
One year on, I thought it was worth having a look at that list of fictional features to see if any of these features had come to pass, and what the community has done to fill the missing gaps, and what might be coming later on. Let’s begin by looking at features on the list that have been implemented so far.
What is now real… sort of
Unlike previous years where the dot releases of the software are usually bug fixes only, the year 2024 saw the dot releases showing off some notable improvements… or at least ideas in the works. In the InDesignSecrets Podcast 324 hosts David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion discuss the 2025 release’s new features in more depth… but there is a sentiment between the hosts that I share, and that is that it’s great that the InDesign team is releasing new features, but they’re all half-baked and we need to wait until the year 2025 to see if the features improve.
- Text to Image. Referred to as magic stock in my original piece, it behaves like generative fill in Photoshop
- Math ML support. As stated in my original piece, over 600 voices on uservoice will be chuffed at this… or at least they will once it improves – see this article
- Generative Expand. Known as magic bleed in my original piece, it has somewhat been implemented in InDesign 2025 by being able to resize a frame that contains an image and use the Firefly engine’s Generative Expand feature to fill the frame with image that was not there before. Again, this is a great feature… or at least will be once it improves – see this article
New 2025 features I hadn’t considered
- Export documents to Adobe Express. I like the idea but not fond of clients being able to effectively walk away with my IP… I would LOVE the idea more if there was the ability for enterprise to be able to “reskin” the user interface and use this as a web-to-print solution by allowing users to make changes to art onscreen but prevent creation of press ready PDF by the end user, but possible by the owner of the artwork.
- Export content as HTML5.
What is being worked on… possibly
- Project RemixALot. Called magic layout in my original piece, this feature proposed taking a hard copy scan, and in one click, InDesign’s magic AI will layout the artwork just like it appeared in the scan. At the 2024 Sneaks presentation of Adobe MAX, this was proposed, but for Illustrator rather than InDesign! I can only hope the feature will be in both.
- Open PDF files in InDesign. This is available in the beta release of InDesign. The original article actually claimed it could open Quark, Affinity Publisher, Scribus and Adobe Express files, but I’ll settle for PDFs for now. If I need to open the other formats, I’ll use Markzware’s OmniMarkz tool.
- Accessibility. While a true accessibility checker is not yet reality in InDesign, several improvements (albeit small) have been made in this area. Check out this article for more information:
Community led and private enterprise efforts
In addition to the new features mentioned, many of the fictional features I’d written about already existed, but as either paid plug-ins; free scripts; or clever workarounds thought of by the community.
- Preflight enforcer – this is one of my own scripts that prevents users from printing or exporting to PDF without a prompt to fix issues addressed via the preflight panel. Much more powerful software is out there by Circular Software called Greenlight.
- A “Clear Dialog” button for the find/change palette hasn’t yet been made, but a clever solution from Ariel Walden serves the same purpose. Read the how-to here.
- Highlight GREP is a feature that already exists in several applications including InDesign’s latest competitor, Affinity Publisher. InDesign scripter and all-round super guy Peter Kahrel has created his own GREP tools that includes such a feature. Make sure to get them here.
- Add page border to the print dialog box. Another awesome scripter Marc Autret of Indiscripts and HurryCover fame has a script that will perform this task. Head over to his site to get it.
- Magic delocaliser that turns local formatting into character styles. Again, Peter Kahrel has delivered the goods – read this article to find out more.
- Actions panel – with +400 votes at indesign.uservoice at the time of writing, the InDesign team has requested more information from users as to what we’d like to see. However it is possible to make recordable actions for any application (not just InDesign) using many of the applications in the marketplace for either Macro Recording software; or hardware such as Elgato’s Streamdeck or Logitech’s MX Creative Keypad.
- Table sort – again the super scripter supreme Peter Kahrel comes to our rescue with the feature that we need!
- Magic graphs – (100 people on uservoice want this) There are paid solutions, such as pie charts by Indiscripts and there is the very powerful Cacidi chart plug-in.
- Magic conform scale (takes raster files and re-renders them to their appropriate output size and DPI) – Zevrix LinkOptimiser is a fantastic solution here.
What didn’t make the cut
Unfortunately, there is still a long list of items from the original article that are still waiting for an InDesign Developer to breathe life into it so that we can all experience the benefits. In no particular order:
- Magic montage
- Magic grammar and consistency (similar to the perfectit word plug-in)
- Data merge accepting Microsoft Excel XLS or XLSX files (+100 people on uservoice want this)
- Data merge being able to toggle layers, conditional text or object states
- Magic family trees (pedigree chart creator)
- Wizards to create calendars, wall planners or diaries. Some exist, such as Scott Selberg’s calendar creator or my own wall planner script
- Find/change having a dedicated table/cell search panel
- Option to split table rows across pages (+900 people on uservoice want this)
- Make text variable/live captions breakable like normal text (+550 people on uservoice want this)
- Rounded corners on tables (+200 people on uservoice want this)
- Disable hover scrolling by default files (+100 people on uservoice want this)
- Fix the anchored object text wrap bug (+260 people on uservoice want this)
- An option to add a gap between left and right pages has now been added for coil binding support (+100 people on uservoice want this)
- Buttons and forms panel updated to include more modern Acrobat interactive fields such as insert image; and also adopt the Acrobat fill and sign infrastructure (unbelievably closed off by Abhinav Agarwal with +180 people on uservoice wanting this)
- Add comments to outgoing PDF
- Magic upscale for low resolution images within an InDesign file
- Time tracking
- Type 1 font support
- Reintroduction of PANTONE color palettes without PANTONE connect like other applications such as the Affinity suite or Corel DRAW!
- QR Code engine upgrade to the Adobe express QR Code engine for appearance of rounded corners and dots
- Embellishment support natively built in.
What would you like to see?
Throughout this article, you may notice that I’ve referred to a site called indesign.uservoice – this is a website that the InDesign Developers curate to primarily have users report on bugs; but there is also a portion of the page dedicated to feature requests. When the original parody piece was made, many of the fictional features were inspired by genuine requests already made to this site.
To be fair on the team, there are 5,085 feature requests at the time of writing, no doubt some of them being duplicates, features that are already there but the user does not know about them, or esoteric issues specific only to that user.
But as my friend’s father once said “you don’t ask, you don’t get” so if you feel there’s a feature in InDesign that ought to be there, or can see a feature on the uservoice that needs more attention, then go there and let your voice be heard.
Would I write another parody piece?
While visiting the USA in 2024 for both CreativePro in Washington DC and Adobe Max in Miami, I’ve had several opportunities to meet many Colecandoo readers face to face, and what often comes up for discussion is the parody piece – everyone I’ve encountered so far loves the article and asks “do you think Adobe has read this?” to which I believe the answer to be yes, having met with several of the InDesign Developers since its publication. Again, there may be a subtle nod to my parody piece in the InDesignSecrets podcast 324 at the 1:37 mark.
Was the piece the reason that the InDesign Developers decided to release some of the features that coincidentally appeared in the parody piece? I’ve love to think the answer was yes, but I don’t believe that to be the case. If anything, the article was a tongue-in-cheek parody that poked fun at software that was really in need of some love. I don’t see the article as “kicking a hornet’s nest” but as stated in previous articles, getting frustrated and angry at the developers was getting me nowhere, so I thought I’d have some fun that other InDesign users could relate to.
With all this in mind, the Colecandoo site isn’t a comedy act. I’m glad readers found the article amusing, but the raison d’être of Colecandoo is to provide helpful and useful advice for anyone using InDesign for an upcoming print project. It was good to do a parody piece once, and I can say that I have now got it out of my system.