Adobe's latest thumb twisting announcement essentially states:

"If you wish to upgrade to CS6 when it eventually comes out you will have to have a copy of CS5 or 5.5 to upgrade from. If you own any version of CS before this you will have to buy the CS6 package as a new user."

Classic monopoly behaviour from Adobe as usual.

I've read conflicting accounts about whether CS5.5 can backsave to CS4, would appreciate if anyone could check this out to confirm.

This article says it can:

http://in-tools.com/article/whats-with- ... -indesign/

I don't currently see any advantage in upgrading Phrustrator, Photoshop or all the other gubbins in the suite so maybe it's best to just upgrade InDesign?

cheers m'dears...

Quark are learning, about a decade too late.

http://publish.quark.com/?elqPURLPage=89

Upgrade to the latest version of QuarkXPress from any previous version for £279.

I still have a copy of QuarkXPress 4.1, which hasn't been used since I switched the arguably much better InDesign some time ago. The upgrade offer is very tempting, I have to say.

This offer ends 31/12/11. I had better make a decision soon.

I was under the impression that you couldn't upgrade individual components of a CS bundle.

Go for it Heather. You know you want to. Quark is sooooo much better On the subject of InDesign, I am about to post a question on a new thread...

Well, I am still giving the "test drive" a bit of a go. I had a spate of traditional XPress crashes, and Marvin the Martian still lurks to zap your items if you so wish.

The app studio looks interesting, but you have to pay money for templates or something. Once money was mentioned, I turned off, so I have no idea what that's all about.

I wanted to try out the ebook stuff, but it wasn't as impressive as the tutorials make out. Vague promises about better stuff to come don't really make me want to buy, despite the good upgrade price.

Otherwise, it was very much what I learned and earned my daily bread with for a decade or more.I now have a decade-long legacy of InDesign work that isn't compatible with XPress that I can see. I've a few more days to play before I have to make the purchase decision, but I'm not entirely convinced just yet.

In other news, I've got Pixelmator and something called Artboard to begin to replace Photoshop and Illustrator. Both apps cost me less than £60 all in. As my final output is to PDF these days, I don't think what actually creates the artwork is much of an issue as long as it's of sufficient resolution for print.

Was it the features of InDesign over Quark which made you switch last time, or just the cost issue? I can see it wouldn't be too appealing going into old jobs finding you have to first convert them to Quark.

Yeah, ID was streets ahead of the version of XP I had - still was until quite recently. XP9 seems to have caught up with most of the stuff like effects and supporting PDF, PSD and AI directly. The fact ID could open my old XP files helped back in the day, and the output straight to PDF saved a lot of time and hassle. I won't be able to import ID work into XP (I just tried, and it doesn't work out of the box: there used to be an XTension, but I haven't looked recently to see if it still exists).

The thing is, do I really need it? The way things seem to be going, I won't need industrial grade DTP applications much longer.

You see, I never really saw any issues with Quark in terms of importing .ai, .psd formats - stuff like that didn't bother me, so we are looking at it from different viewpoints. I could always, of course, understand the cost issue, but Adobe are doing exactly what I knew they would when all that pricing structure first came out, but at least it got Quark to sort itself out a bit.

One thing I have noticed by working on two large InDesign documents supplied by different agencies this year - the software doesn't half encourage bad practice (in my view), of importing jpegs and rgb file formats, which then just get fixed when outputting to pdfs. I don't like not having that control over the quality and conversion of the images, but there is no way I am sifting through 1000+ pics just to make myself feel better!

Your bottom line Heather, is that it seems you can't see yourself having this conversation in another 10 years, so why bother changing?

In a way, yes. If I felt there was business to be had then I'd jump right now, and keep my current copy of InDesign until it no longer worked on my system. For producing ebooks, though, Pages does it right off the bat - and didn't cost me the earth! (£13.99 on the App Store.)

I know what you mean about bad practices, though. Sloppy layout is still sloppy layout. I was amazed at the lack of rigour applied to developing and maintaining stylesheets when I freelanced for a place back in the summer. This wasn't a fly-by-night organisation, either, yet I was having to correct stuff that I deemed to be elementary to getting the job done quickly and efficiently.

About the graphics: I like not having to bother about converting images to CMYK. I like not having multiple copies of files about the place. One image generally serves for the print layout, and also the web layout. Support for the native formats all the way through the production process, even not having to worry overly much when it comes to final output, is a real boon. With the right PDF settings, pretty much everything is sorted out without worry. It's the way design and creative work should be, really. Freeway made me lazy like that, and I'm all for it.

Many of the production skills I had to learn in the 1990s are all but redundant now, thanks to the transparent import/export of native formats. I don't even worry about trapping to any extent any more. It gives me more scope to be free with designs, and not feel restricted in case something goes wonky.

We could go on like this for ages - old hands that we are. Part of me wants to keep my hand in. Realistically, I really can't afford to spend money speculatively in the hope it may help down the line. I can't foresee how things will pan out in 2012, but right now I have all the tools I need to do most things. No-one's complained yet.

I have 4, but I'm using 3. Unless XML support has been significantly improved in 6, I see no reason to upgrade.

As for the graphics thing original full res rgbs all the way and sort it out at PDF time. It does a great job and means I have different colour profiles for different output methods.

I would never call myself a designer, and therefore prefer to know what I am importing into my jobs is controlled regarding all aspects, but I know by taking layouts from designers how they don't like to let things like grids, file formats and stylesheets affect their creative flow!

Good to chat with you again anyway, Heather, even though I hijacked the thread a little! Enjoy your Christmas.

Colour spaces aside, how do you handle image sharpening when you know the final output size of images? Photoshop is best for resizing, sharpening and converting images, all of which I manually sort out when the artwork has been approved. Surely having all sorts of image sizes, resolutions and colour spaces, with no sharpening on the images, gives inconsistent and not entirely satisfactory results.... or does it?

When it reduces it for PDF, it gives decent results, I've never looked into what method it uses.

hmm...
The XP upgrade route is possible but not without one heck of a lot of palaver, probably not feasible within the timescale due to circs beyond my control...

Having converted the main mag to INDD and since produced two others that always were INDD it's not summat I'd undertake lightly again...

Am now ruing my naivety in purchasing what I thought was a genuine upgrade, only to discover I'd been sent a US Student version. Returned it today with the promise of a refund, gawd knows if that'll turn out to be true tho' ...sigh...

Methinks I'll just stick with what I've got until a new job justifies the upgrade (wistfully hopeful scenario...). Have kept two mags in CS3 and one in CS4 - can't really say there's much difference other than a slightly more user friendly interface in CS4.

Feeling bruised and battered, and heartily sick of the whole upgrade bollards.