Description:
Adobe InDesign 2.0 is simply the best professional print design and layout package available. Version 2.0 outweighs former market leader QuarkXPress and should dominate the future of desktop publishing with significant performance improvements, seamless integration with other Adobe products, and a bevy of sophisticated new visual effects and cross-media integration. Previous versions of InDesign were processor-intensive and sluggish. InDesign 2.0 runs significantly faster and smoother, even on older systems like Pentium I and II PCs. For Mac users, it is OS X native. Graphic designers will love InDesign's robust feature set, which includes advanced type tools that allow for multiple font-control options at both the character and paragraph level. InDesign 2.0 also incorporates many of the most useful Photoshop visual effects, including editable drop shadows, lighting effects, feathering, and transparency that can be applied to any object--text, graphics, or images. These effects can also be imported with native Photoshop and Illustrator file placement. In addition, InDesign's unlimited multiple undo and redo options offer a major improvement over QuarkXPress. InDesign 2.0 not only supports tables and multipage table formatting (Quark 5.0 cannot format multipage tables), it can also convert and retain the original formatting of any tab-delimited table data from word processing, database, or spreadsheet documents such as Microsoft Word and Excel. InDesign 2.0 allows for seamless Acrobat PDF file import and placement, as well as the ability to import both PageMaker and QuarkXPress documents (3.3 or later). As with previous versions, InDesign 2.0 does not support documents created with QuarkXTensions. InDesign also does not allow for export to Quark or PageMaker formats or backward-compatibility file export, as did older InDesign file versions. However, users can export InDesign 2.0 files in multiple media formats, including EPS, SVG, RTF, HTML, and XML. You can also embed Metadata (XMP) into InDesign layouts for automated workflows. InDesign 2.0's Web publishing options are a significant step up over previous versions but are still fairly primitive; InDesign is emphatically not a Web editor but instead offers limited Web publishing support. The HTML export automatically converts most text to images (rather than exact-positioning CSS layers as one might expect), producing very large files with frequently poor image quality and few image optimization options. There's also no support for browser preview, rollovers, or image maps, which QuarkXPress 5.0 provides. InDesign offers fairly simple and easy-to-use, well-formed XML support (no DTDs) that can both import and export XML tags; the XML in rival QuarkXPress is more advanced but less product-integrated and is DTD-based. With its focus on visual effects, design production, and prepress and printing needs, plus the added bonus of multichannel publishing support (print, Web, etc.), InDesign 2.0 is clearly intended for professional print and graphic designers. For easier-to-learn and more basic office and small-business document publishing, Adobe PageMaker or even a Microsoft publishing product is more appropriate. Conversely, for large technical publications or larger corporations with true cross-media publishing and content-management needs, Adobe FrameMaker is a better option, with more advanced native support for content markup languages and multiple export formats. Though InDesign 2.0 offers many compelling new features, there remains room for improvement, particularly for HTML export, WYSIWYG type menus, and more targeted user tools. However, these are small complaints. InDesign 2.0 should be the product of choice for today's design professional. --Rich Ting
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