New Features in Adobe InDesign 2024

By Michael Peters · Published March 17, 2026 · Last updated March 24, 2026

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InDesign 2024: What's New

Adobe InDesign 2024 introduces a range of enhancements targeting workflow efficiency, document organisation, and digital publishing. Here is a summary of the most notable additions. For context on InDesign's evolution to this point, see our History of Adobe InDesign.

Auto Style for Text Frames

The Auto Style feature automatically applies consistent paragraph and character formatting to text frames based on your defined styles. This reduces the need to manually apply styles to newly placed text and helps maintain design uniformity across long documents. It is particularly useful in data-driven publishing workflows where text content is frequently updated or replaced.

In practice, Auto Style works by associating a default paragraph style — or a set of rules — with a given text frame. When new text flows into that frame, whether from a manual paste, a data merge, or a linked text file, the style is applied automatically without the designer needing to select the text and apply the style manually. This might sound like a minor convenience, but on a catalogue with hundreds of product entries or a report template where content editors frequently update copy, it can eliminate a significant class of formatting errors. The feature complements the existing Paragraph Style Mapping functionality and is worth exploring if your workflow involves any degree of automation or editorial handoff.

Searchable Text in Publish Online

Documents published via Publish Online now include searchable text, making digital publications more accessible and improving discoverability. Readers can use browser-based search to find content within the publication, which significantly improves usability for long-form documents such as catalogues, reports, and magazines.

Publish Online has been a feature of InDesign since 2015, but the lack of text searchability had been a persistent limitation — particularly for anything longer than a few pages. A reader browsing a 200-page product catalogue needed to scroll through the entire document to find a specific item. With searchable text, they can use the browser's native search or a search bar within the published document to jump directly to relevant content. This makes Publish Online considerably more practical for reference documents, technical publications, and anything where readers need to locate specific information rather than read linearly. If you have been avoiding Publish Online for content-heavy documents because of this limitation, InDesign 2024 is a good moment to reconsider.

Dynamic Filename Suffixes

InDesign 2024 allows users to define dynamic filename suffixes when exporting documents. These suffixes can incorporate variables such as date, version number, or custom strings, eliminating the need to manually rename exported files. This is valuable for teams managing multiple versions of a document across different output formats.

The practical impact of this feature is most obvious in multi-format publishing workflows. A typical scenario might involve exporting the same document as a print-ready PDF (PDF/X-4), a screen-optimised PDF, and an EPUB, all with different export settings. With static filenames, this requires either exporting to different folders or manually renaming files after export to avoid overwriting. Dynamic suffixes allow you to encode the output type, date, or version directly in the filename at export time — Annual-Report-2024-print.pdf, Annual-Report-2024-screen.pdf — without a manual renaming step. For organisations running scheduled export jobs or batch processes, this removes a common source of file management errors.

Hide Spreads

The Hide Spreads feature allows designers to temporarily hide specific spreads within a document without deleting them. Hidden spreads are excluded from output and PDF export while remaining part of the file for reference. This is useful for managing alternate layouts, draft sections, or content that is not ready for a particular deliverable.

Hide Spreads addresses a workflow need that many InDesign users have worked around using separate files or conditional text. Previously, if you needed to maintain a draft section alongside a finished document, the options were to keep them in separate InDesign files, use layers creatively, or export with specific page ranges. Hide Spreads is cleaner: the spreads remain in the document, visible to the designer in the Pages panel, but are completely excluded from any export or print operation. This is particularly useful for book chapters in different states of completion, for maintaining client-specific variants of a document within a single file, or for keeping alternate versions of a spread that might be reinstated later without needing to rebuild them from scratch.

AI-Assisted Features via Adobe Sensei

InDesign 2024 continues to integrate Adobe's AI capabilities. AI-powered text reflow suggestions and smart layout adjustments help automate some of the more mechanical aspects of document adaptation — particularly for multi-format publishing where the same content needs to work across different page sizes.

Adobe has been integrating Sensei into InDesign incrementally over several versions. In 2024, the emphasis is on content-aware layout adaptation — helping designers who need to repurpose a print layout for a different format without rebuilding it manually. The AI suggests how text and images might be repositioned or resized to fit a different page geometry, which the designer can accept, modify, or ignore. This is not full automation — the output still requires human review and refinement — but it reduces the mechanical work involved in format adaptation. For agencies that regularly produce the same content in A4, A5, and digital-screen formats, even partial automation of this process represents a meaningful time saving.

Performance Improvements

Adobe has continued to improve InDesign's performance with large documents, including faster page rendering and reduced memory usage when working with complex layouts containing many linked graphics.

Performance has been a recurring theme in InDesign releases for the past several years. The 2024 version shows particular improvement in documents with large numbers of linked graphics — the kind of catalogue or technical manual that might link hundreds of high-resolution image files. Page turn times, display rendering when zooming, and the speed of operations like Find/Change across large documents are all noticeably faster compared to InDesign 2022. For users who spend their days working with complex, graphic-heavy layouts, this is the kind of unglamorous improvement that makes a real difference to daily productivity. It does not make headlines like new features do, but it matters.

Colour Themes and Improved UI Customisation

InDesign 2024 extends the application's UI customisation options, including improvements to colour theme handling and workspace management. Designers can now create and save workspace configurations more reliably, and the UI scales better across high-DPI displays. This is a relatively minor addition in isolation, but it reflects Adobe's continued attention to the experience of users who spend eight hours a day in the application. Getting the UI out of the way — making it feel comfortable and predictable — is a legitimate productivity concern for professional designers, and it is encouraging to see Adobe treating it as such.

Developer Perspective

From a plugin and scripting standpoint, InDesign 2024 maintains compatibility with existing CEP extensions and ExtendScript-based scripts while continuing to expand UXP API coverage. Developers building InDesign plugins should review the updated scripting DOM for new objects and properties introduced in this version. The Hide Spreads feature, in particular, introduces new DOM properties for spread visibility that automation scripts may need to account for — scripts that export or process all pages in a document should be updated to respect the hidden state of spreads if they are to behave consistently with the application's own export behaviour.

The UXP migration from CEP is still in progress — Adobe has not yet matched the full CEP API surface in UXP for InDesign — so most production extensions continue to run on CEP. Adobe has indicated that CEP will remain supported for the foreseeable future, which is welcome news for organisations with significant investments in existing CEP-based tooling. The practical advice for developers is to build new extensions on UXP where the required APIs exist, and to use CEP only where UXP cannot yet cover the use case. See our article on UXP extensions in Adobe InDesign for a more detailed look at the development model.

Mapsoft has extensive experience developing for InDesign across all recent versions. See our InDesign development page for more information on our capabilities.