There's a couple of well rounded blogs that you should keep an eye on and search

http://indesignsecrets.com/whats-new-in-indesign-cs4.php

http://www.theindesigner.com/blog/episode-51-introducing-indesign-cs4

There's the help file itself
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WSFE4C4DDD-967A-4cf0-845F-AB2B86FCC809a.html

A roundup here

http://desktoppub.about.com/b/2008/09/23/whats-new-in-adobe-indesign-cs4.htm


Basically you're looking at

Live Preflight
Customisable Links
Conditional text function
Interactive features
SWF output
RIA and Flash CS4 support
Page transitions for PDF and SWF files
Smart Guides
Spread Rotation
Smart Text Reflow

http://www.doozler.blogspot.com/

Thank you for the info. CS4 looks like a step up and you would expect that being an upgrade. It seems a shame that you can do a lot more with text in photoshop, with that being more of an image provider than you can in Indesign.Well at least that is what it seems.
Johnnie

You see, that's where many people get caught up.

Photoshop is fantastic for doing weird and wonderful things. You can manipulate images and text and colours like there is no tomorrow.

It is fantastic. But that is photoshop, it is for manipulating things like that get a great appearance.

That's where InDesign comes into play. InDesign isn't an image or photo editor. InDesign is Page Layout application. This is where you bring in all your elements from external or previous made elements.

The main difference with Photoshop is that it is primarily geared towards Raster (bitmap/pixel) images. That means that if your image is 300 dpi, then you can't increase the size of it without distorting the quality of the image. The whole program is primarily based around bitmap.

So you look at Illustrator next, you can do wonderful illustrations, they are primarily vector based. There is a plethora of things you can design in Illustrator (even redrawing human faces to extraordinary accuracy) the beauty about this is because they are vector based (mathematic equations) they can be increased to almost any size imaginable.


Where InDesign is a happy medium, this is where you bring in your wonderful Photoshop Images, along with your Illustrator items. This where you plan them up on a page. Because InDesign is a page layout program, it's not an Illustrator package and it's not a Photoshop package. It's completely different. It's to bring all your wonderful artwork that you created in different apps, whethere they are Vector or Bitmap and you can layout your page to your liking.

Along with this you get fantastic text control, facing pages, single pages, any page size, margins, columns, keep options, paragraph/character/object/table styles, base one style on another etc.

InDesign is the application that brings all your elements together and gives you the opportunity to lay them out in book or brochure or single page layouts, that is easily exported to PDF to send to a printers.

You wouldn't put a 4 page booklet together in Photoshop(you can but it's a nightmare, especially when you get to booklet/books with more than 8 pages, where you need folios, running heads, master pasges, styles etc.)

So don't dismiss InDesign, it's an immenseley powerful Page Layout application, that ticks far more boxes in terms of PAge layout than Photoshop or Illustrator put together.

 

http://www.doozler.blogspot.com/

I should add that probably all books you see in any bookshop are made with Page Layout applications.

So for book work, or just general brochure layouts etc. are done in the following:

Mainstream page layout apps are
Quark
InDesign



Free one would be:
Scribus


Image Editing software:

Free Photoshop like one:
Gimp

Free Illustrator like one:
Inkscape

http://www.doozler.blogspot.com/

Thank you for your very detailed repsonse that is extremely helpful.
I guess what I was really trying to say was,it would be nice to have some of the text manipulating features in Photoshop available to InDesign because, although you can use the images of text that you have created in photoshop, they cannot be edited/changed apart from the image being made smaller or larger but even then they look out of proportion.
My experience with both Photoshop & InDesign is very limited indeed so to be able to change a text shape with just a click would be very welcome.
Because of this inexperience I get into difficulty trying to create the right shape for typing on a path.
Regards Johnnie

Well if you're working with text in Photoshop, as long as you don't rasterise the layer, you can save the file as .PDF that way you can open the PDF in photoshop and edit the text again if you need to.

The advantage of saving as PDF from photoshop is that PDF supports both Raster and Vector data. So you can have an image with text over it. Apply some effects to the text layer. Save as a PDF (version 6 or above to preserve layers) and you can now edit that text layer again in photoshop at later dates.



To be honest it would be nice if InDesign did have some more control, but I can why there isn't. InDesign is a massive publications application that there's already a lot of things in there. And photoshop is such a large photo editing application that to put page layout utilitites in there would make photoshop not photo-shop.

If you get  me.

http://www.doozler.blogspot.com/