I work for a government agency, and we are considering upgrading from CS3 soon. We primarily use InDesign, with occasional uses of Photoshop and very rare uses of Illustrator. We also heavily use Acrobat Pro.
We currently have Acrobat 8.3.0 and InDesign 5.0.4. We are running Windows 7 on machines with 4 GB RAM and a 32-BIT Operating System.
We use InDesign to create forms. There are occasional graphics, but not many. We also use color very rarely. We use paragraph styles heavily, but not object styles.
My question is, should we upgrade from CS3, all the way to CS6? Our main concern is that our thousands of forms make the conversion from one version to the next with as little movement as possible. The placement of elements on the page is very precise, and changes in the documents needs to be avoided as much as possible. I realize that some adjustments, especially in text, are going to happen.
We also need to be sure that whatever we upgrade to will still work well with Acrobat. We are hoping that will also get upgraded, but we aren't sure about that at this point.
Does anyone have any recommendations? Would we be better off going to CS5 or CS5.5 now and upgrading to CS6 from there later?
My boss has no interest in going to the Cloud concept. Continuous updates that could possibly affect form layout is something we want to avoid.
I understand that at this point we can't actually upgrade to CS6, we will have to pay the full price for new licenses. I'm not so clear on whether we will be able to continue to upgrade in the future without going to the cloud concept. I believe you will be able to, but if anyone knows different please let me know.
Thanks.