InDesign "Future Technologies" Sneak Peek Shown in New York

Adobe showed a sneak peek of what may be coming in a future version of InDesign CS at last week's Partners in Publishing seminar in New York. In the unprepared and unscheduled demonstration of "future technology," attendees saw

* The ability to turn on and off Photoshop layers and and layer comps from within InDesign.
* A new, powerful Microsoft Word import filter that let you map Word styles to InDesign styles
* Anchoring objects to text, but placing them outside the text frame
* An Apply Next Style feature that lets you quickly apply a series of paragraph styles to a whole story with one click

Adobe had already shown a early sneak peek at some future technologies at The InDesign Conference in Boston last July, where they demoed an impressive drag-and-drop text feature, a Move Pages dialog box, the ability to lock column guides, and the ability to update library items faster. Although Adobe has been careful not to announce any new versions of InDesign -- or whether any of these features would be in the next version of the product -- they have also indicated that a new version (which some rumor mills are predicting will be called "CS2") is likely to appear this Spring.