Adobe InDesign 2.0

Rating:
Summary: feature rich, but awkward
Review: Adobe's inDesign is poised to take over the page layout market for OSX, as Quark is too busy resting on its laurels to publish a native version. I like inDesign, with it's familiar Adobe set-up and compatibility between popular programs...but inDesign is not perfect.

The main problem I have with inDesign is that it's painfully slow on my G3 Pismo PowerBook. I used Quark as both a word processor and for page layout, but inDesign cannot be used as a word processor on my system. Paragraphs of any length become difficult to edit as the computer lag to update the formatting is absolutely unacceptable.

I've come to writing my text in TextEdit and then cutting and pasting the final result. However, if I find typos in proof-reading, it's actually faster to edit the TextEdit version and then, once again, cut and paste it back in to inDesign.

That's terrible.

I'm also not a fan of the way inDesign does not automatically create new pages with text frames if your text flows over. In Quark it's automatic, based on the Master pages, but in inDesign, there's some manual clicking that needs to take place.

It's awkward and counter-intuitive.

If you're going to lay out a magazine on OSX, this is really the only way to go. My wish is inDesign 3 will have my issues resolved, but even if they are, that doesn't help my current frustrations. If not, they're leaving a tiny space open for Quark to get back in to the race.

Rating:
Summary: Pagemaker: 1980s, Quark: 1990s, InDesign: 21st Century
Review: InDesign has added professional capabilities that have not be available in of-the-shelf digital page layout: paragraph justification, transparency, optical margin alignments, optical kerning, OpenType support, and much more. It has added an excellent table editor. The table can even flow, linked, from page to page, and be formatted with paragraph styles.

Any frame can hold pictures and/or type. The list goes on and on. The most common complaint when my students go to the required Quark courses: "It's like stepping back into the dark ages." They all hate it once they have tried InDesign.

Rating:
Summary: Pagemaker: 1980s, Quark: 1990s, InDesign: 21st Century
Review: InDesign has added professional capabilities that have not be available in of-the-shelf digital page layout: paragraph justification, transparency, optical margin alignments, optical kerning, OpenType support, and much more. It has added an excellent table editor. The table can even flow, linked, from page to page, and be formatted with paragraph styles.

Any frame can hold pictures and/or type. The list goes on and on. The most common complaint when my students go to the required Quark courses: "It's like stepping back into the dark ages." They all hate it once they have tried InDesign.

Rating:
Summary: All the other reviews were old...
Review: Looking at the reviews I see that these are over a year old, and someone needs to note that Quark does run natively on OSX at this point, so why would you spend just about the same money on InDesign? The concept is cool, but I found it awkward to use, and certainly not something I could bump into my workflow without problems. Some of the printers we use do not accept the InDesign files for output. If you are on the other end and looking for a program to learn, to add the skill to your resume, do your self a favor, and get Quark. I've not seen any design or production positions open with InDesign as a requirement, but Quark is always a necessity.

Rating:
Summary: InDesign 2.0 - FINALLY a page layout program with features!
Review: My favorite features in InDesign 2.0?

Creating baseline grids (to keep your columns of text aligned) is incredibly easy.

A Glyph palette for browsing and inserting any glyph in a font, and a shortcut menu for quickly inserting special characters.

Character Styles to augment Paragraph styles.

OpenType Fonts can contain up to 65,000 characters and you can tell InDesign to automatically substitute swash characters, ligatures, ordinals, fractions, etc., as you type. You don't have to do all the work of using a different face for ligatures and swash characters, saving tons of time.

Multiple undo/redo and automatic recovery of documents after a system or power failure.

Transparency Easily apply drop shadows, feathering, and other opacity settings within InDesign. No more going back to a source file's application for that. Soft edges are maintained when placing transparent Photoshop files! Also maintain transparency in imported Illustrator files, as well as Acrobat 5.0 PDF files.

Text on a Path Align text on a path in few quick steps, and apply special effects, such as Ribbon and Gravity.

Tables are easy to create in InDesign. And you can, import styled Microsoft© Word and Excel tables directly, or turn tab-delimited text files into tables in one step. Quickly reformat the look and feel of tables: Set row height and column width, apply color fills to alternating rows, merge cells, insert graphics, and specify high-end typographical settings.

Importing PDF files is simple. You can choose exactly how it comes in and re-size the PDF for paste up in the document.

InDesign no longer requires the AdobePS driver, so it fits into a wider variety of print work flows, and it offers a consistent cross-platform experience. New printing features include the ability to save high-quality, driver-independent PostScript© files directly from the print dialog box; the ability to print master pages,

Preflighting/packaging controls-I was able to identify problems with linked graphics, fonts, and colors in my InDesign documents using built-in preflighting controls. Then I can use it to package all required files, including the necessary fonts, for hand-off to print production.

Paragraph Composer and Optical Kerning let me fine tune the look of words, paragraphs and columns for high quality typography..

What do I miss in InDesign?

I wish there was a Story Editor that allowed me to view an entire story at once, even if it was threaded across several pages. That's really valuable when I need to cut or rearrange an article for fit.

I would like a palette to adjust the size of a font or its leading or the weight of a stroke up or down in tenth of a point increments by clicking on something or using my up and down arrows. InDesign's character palette's little arrows adjust by a full point only. To adjust by fractions of a point, I have to change to the text tool, click in the boxes and type the exact number.

Final Verdict?

InDesign is a Superior Product for Designers. It saves you from jumping around in other programs to perform tasks, and its typography controls have no match.

Rating:
Summary: NEWSFLASH: Quark is HISTORY
Review: When Steve Jobs announced that all the new 2003 Macs would only be able to boot in OS X, I figured it was time to step up to the plate, get oriented to the new OS and upgrade our art department. The only thing holding me back was not having a page layout app that ran natively in 10, and I had no intention of working in Jurassic mode. I had heard less than positive things about InDesign 1.0, but figured I'd do the free tryout from Adobe, since it would give me the chance to test drive Jaguar in an all-Adobe environment.

Talk about a revelation. This program's ease of use had me creating usable projects inside of a week, and by the time the tryout expired, I had converted about 150 pages of our company catalog from the old Quark files. That was when I realized how much we truly needed this package. It was as if I'd been using it for years. I could import files from Illustrator and Photoshop without having to save them as tiffs or eps. I could export press optimized pdfs without going through Distiller, that weighed in at a thrifty 4.5 mb ..... not bad when the Photoshop elements totalled over 50 meg! The tables tool is extremely helpful; it functions like a mini Excel, eliminating the need for tabs in charts. The text formatting is a breeze, the preview display looks great even at low quality, and proofs that I output to my inket printer look phenomenal. Just try doing that in Quark without getting nauseous. But wait - there's more ...... layer support and blending modes, transparency, drop shadows, gradiated text, and the list goes on. We don't need no steenking XTensions .........

Adobe InDesign is, at the time of this writing (11/02) still the only layout app that runs natively in Mac OS X (despite Amazon's claim that it is for OS 9 and below, why on earth would Adobe release something like that??), thus completing the Holy Publishing Trinity with Illy and PShop. In a way, Quark has done us a favor by dragging their feet on upgrading, thereby giving us a chance to try out a tool that is so much better, more intuitive and integrated with the other tools we have to use. It's as if Adobe stood back and observed all that didn't quite work about QXP (and that other abomination PageMaker which the company may just as well disavow), and created an app that works beautifully without having to think about it too much. Whatever the case, the timing is right, and we Mac users really appreciate it.

Adobe InDesign and Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar is, quite simply, a publisher's marriage made in Heaven.