At the recent annual star-studded Adobe MAX conference, there was lots of talk and demos of the company’s truly amazing advancements in Generative AI and Adobe Express (seen as their reply to Canva) – met with plenty of infectious enthusiasm and whooping from the audience.

Back in the reality of the workplace, Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions for pretty much every designer and many editors throughout the book publishing industry can mean paying up to £85 every month for software that has often seemed, figuratively as well as literally, thousands of miles away from the centre of attention.

In recent years, InDesign’s new features lists could barely fill a tweet (sorry, a ‘post on X‘!) – especially in the area of accessibility, where I had become increasingly vocal in my frustrations with their lack of pace of development in this vital area.

So, what’s changed?

Whilst I am not yet whooping, I am pleasantly surprised to report that within the last twelve months things have become noticeably different.

Here’s my round up of the most notable new features for book publishers that are now available in Adobe InDesign 2025.

AI comes to ID

I’ll leave the debate around the use of AI to others, but from a technical standpoint we have started to see the impressive Generative AI tools pioneered in Photoshop now making their way into InDesign. But these new methods should be used with caution for now.

When an image does not fill a frame, the new Generative Expand command can auto generate extra image to the edges to fill in the missing space. This can work really well, especially with more neutral backgrounds such as natural landscapes or sky.

And if we want to generate completely new images, InDesign has a way to add simple text prompts with Text to Image. A selection of three suggested images can be chosen from and sample prompts, reference images, and style effects can be from the Advanced dialog box.

Both these features work well on screen, but InDesign does not yet match the quality and control found in Photoshop. For professional production we need to mindful of the resolution, colour profiles and compression. See more in the article Why You Should Use Generative Expand in Photoshop, Not InDesign on the CreativePro site.

UI changes for new users

There is a lot of depth to InDesign, and it can be a hard for new users to know where to start. Adobe are trying to help beginners across InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator find their feet by making similar changes to the User Interface (UI). We’ve recently seen the Properties panel, more visual tool tips and even short video clips directly in the apps. These have now been joined by the Contextual Task Bar to offer the most commonly used features right next the cursor on the page whilst we work.

All these features can be distracting for the more experienced user but, rather than immediately switching off the Contextual Task Bar (Window menu > Contextual Task Bar), I suggest trying the option to pin it out of the way at the bottom of your screen.

Another feature that has been around in Photoshop for a long time, and Illustrator for a while too, is the History panel, which seems like a natural addition to InDesign. Every document change is listed allowing undo and redo multiple steps and revert to previous states or create a new document from any state. It currently only comes into life after the first save.

InDesign 2025 also provides an option to export and import User Settings, so users now have a way to transfer and restore custom preferences if needed.

Accessibility updates

After a decade of inertia, Adobe have started to revisit the EPUB export from InDesign in advance of the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming in June 2025 and there has been some real improvements in the last few months.

A new Accessibility panel within the InDesign EPUB export options allows the user to set the required accessibility metadata. However, it is still down to the user to declare the accessibility of each export.

Another welcome addition is the inclusion of page markers, a navigation page list and the pagination source. This is an accessibility requirement to let readers of reflowable EPUBs, especially for reference or educational titles, move to the same page location as readers of the physical book.

Image descriptions have also seen some renewed attention recently, with the ability to now add descriptions to the cover artwork on export, to pull in descriptions from image metadata or to mark images as decorative.

The management and accessibility of footnotes and endnotes has also been improved for EPUB. You can now include the note number in the link back to the main text and add some accessibility roles that help identify and describe the notes and backlinks.

As you may know, the EPUB standard is based on the open standards of the web and a lot of EPUB accessibility comes from following best practices for online. Adding a useful title to each HTML section helps readers using assistive technology with navigation. InDesign now uses the top-level heading for the HTML title use if one exists on the page.

The long standing bug that meant the language of the ebooks had been incorrectly declared at the top of each EPUB section pages for years has also now been fixed. This means that, with newly export EPUBs, text to speech (TTS) uses the right language and accent and electronic braille is displayed using the correct characters.

The ability to import, edit and create complex accessible maths expressions has arrived in InDesign 2025. MathML is a markup language supported by the EPUB standard. By using the new ability to add and edit MathML, we can place as visual SVG images with embedded MathML. This is a good start, but there is still some scope for improvement as there are currently limitations. There are restrictions on the fonts that can be used and, whilst colours can be altered, they are in the RGB colour space. Even when simply using black this means they become a four colour rich black in CMYK which is not ideal for print.

Finally, for now, when exporting tables from InDesign to EPUB, a small change has been made to ensure that non-empty cells in the header row are now correctly marked in the EPUB code.

Adobe’s work in this important field may not grab the attention like their AI features but it is encouraging and should be applauded. There is more work yet to do to and Adobe publicly committed to further important feature changes by May 2025 in a recent session in Frankfurt.

Other notable new features

Adobe have put a lot of effort into their Adobe Express online tool for creating social posts, animated images, videos etc. – and InDesign now has a route to export and open InDesign documents with Export into Adobe Express. I can see opportunities here to help get actual artwork from the designed book page shared with marketing more easily.

There are also some improvements to the Export to HTML5 package feature to extract book content for digital use.

The Pages panel now has the ability to hide spreads and a new control in Hide Spreads from the main design canvas as well as the output. Any automatic page numbering will also be modified as if the hidden spreads do not exist. This may become useful for keeping different design ideas in the same document or modifying contents different for different audiences.

There is also better support when copying and pasting between Illustrator and InDesign, including preserving text formatting and applied effects where possible, and more support for modern image formats such as those used by smart phones. We can now modify the case of text across a document using Find and Change, as well as menu command, but not yet as part of a text style.

Lastly, the recently introduced ability to save documents to the Cloud is a little underwhelming, but I do think it is an important step towards real-time editing online. This is actually something that has been promised for long time and that I wrote about here on BookMachine nearly four years ago: Are you ready to use InDesign on the web?

More to come…

Along with the update to the main InDesign app, users can now also access the public InDesign Beta in the Adobe Creative Cloud app.

We should note that this is a separate install from the main released app and it should be used only for testing and feedback. It is not recommended for production files!

Features currently being experimented in the InDesign (Beta) app include:

Create any shape and Generate effect to fill it using simple text prompts. You can also describe the shape to customise the prompt.

Assign text elements in your InDesign document to editors, allowing them to update text content directly in a web browser with InCopy on the web.

An InDesign PDF document can be converted back to InDesign file conversion.

Update when ready

There are plenty of reasons to make the update to Adobe InDesign 2025 – and the Adobe Creative Cloud makes it almost too easy to do so! My advice is always to make sure you use the same version as your colleagues if you are sharing work on the same project and choose to make the move together when you are ready.

Be aware that, at time of writing, some 80+ early InDesign 2025 users have already reported it’s sluggish behaviour and the option to Clear History in the History Panel menu and to disable the Contextual Task bar (Window menu > untick the Contextual Task bar) are some of the suggestions I have seen to improve this.

As is usual after the first major release, a ‘bug fix’ update follows soon after and version 20.0.1 is already out with fixes for minor issues that have been reported since the version 20 release.

In conclusion, it does feel like we have entered a period of rejuvenation for this familiar old workhorse that continues to be relied upon by the book publishing industry and I see this as good news for my company Circular Software that works alongside InDesign. Rather than having to fix errors and fill in feature gaps we can move more into extending and applying these new features as well as offering tools, training and advice to enable publishers to use the entire range of InDesign features in the best way for them and their readers.

If you want to dive into more detail, fellow geek James Wamser maintains an exhaustive Adobe InDesign New Features Guide detailing every new feature that has arrived in each major and minor update of InDesign since version 1.0 back in 1999.

Full info on all these new features is also available on the What’s new in InDesign page on the Adobe site where the images for this article are also from.

Ken Jones is a BookMachine Editorial Board member and runs Circular Software. Offering software, training and advice to publishers such as Quarto Group, Bonnier Books, Simon & Schuster and Pan Macmillan to help them get the best from their print and digital workflows.