Adobe InDesign CC 2020 New Feature | Nip Creative

Wednesday, November 27, 2019 4 Comments Edit

1. Find Similar Images

Thanks to Adobe Sensei artificial intelligence making its way into InDesign we can now quickly find alternatives for any of our images used in InDesign documents. All you need to do is to right click on an image and you will get similar image results in the CC Libraries panel.

This feature relies purely on the Adobe Stock library, which is not included in the Creative Cloud subscription, so if you are planning to license any assets from it you will have to pay separately by buying credits.

2. Variable Fonts

This new font technology was first introduced to Photoshop, then to Illustrator and now finally it made its way to InDesign. The key difference with these type of fonts is that you have attributes to control the appearance of your text instead of relying on manually selecting the right style (Bold, Italic, Condensed, etc.).

This means that a Variable Font can have hundreds of style variations but thanks to the attributes you can very quickly pick the version right for you. Adobe Fonts offers some Variable Fonts but unfortunately currently there is no way to quickly filter them on the website.

V-fonts on the other hand is a great resource of Variable Fonts collected from various sources. The best thing about this site is that you can also test the attributes of the fonts in the browser.

Here are a few really cool examples worth downloading and testing out in InDesign:

3. Column Rules

In InDesign CC 2020 we also got a new and useful feature to add rules (lines) between columns. This option was added into Text Frame Options and it is also available inside Object Styles, which makes it easy to quickly re-apply if you are planning to use it several times within a document.

It's worth mentioning that from now on you can also assign shortcuts to InDesign Styles even if you don't have a NumPad on your keyboard. This used to be a restriction in past versions.

4. SVG compatibility

Last but not least we also have the ability to import SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) into InDesign. These files are similar to EPS and PDF files, with the difference that they can be used in web browsers.

The ability to use them in InDesign can be especially handy if you are using the Publish Online feature and sharing your documents with people online. Using SVG files in this case will result in always crisp graphics no matter the user's screen resolution.