Clips/ Cover Story

SDP Previews Adobe's InDesign
By Richard Trombly | The SDP Documentor: Fall 1999

SDP members got a sneak peek at the rumored "Quark killer" professional layout package from Adobe.

The package, InDesign, was released at the end of August and complements the existing line of Adobe products.

The Evolution of InDesign

"This is the next step," said Territory Manger Donna Dunn, who presented InDesign last Spring. "I have been entrenched in the FrameMaker and Acrobat world. We have here a foray into a different sort of publishing tool." She stressed that InDesign is neither a replacement for, nor a merger of, FrameMaker or Pagemaker.

"This is a completely new product which is dedicated for a marketplace that Adobe has really been unable to play in for a number of years," she said.

At the beginning of desktop publishing, all you needed was a Macintosh, Pagemaker, and a laser printer, she said. The industry has evolved considerably since then with the introduction of QuarkXPress being a major step forward.

"While Pagemaker was really good for creating brochures, it is not the tool to choose for the high-end publishing market." Dunn said, "I can guarantee most of the magazines and catalogs that come to your home were not created with Adobe products."

Some years ago when Adobe strategists decided to enter the highend publishing market, they debated whether to rewrite and improve Pagemaker or to start from scratch. Since Pagemaker was designed in the 80s, and there have been so many recent technological advances, they chose to create a completely new tool.

"FrameMaker will continue to play in the technical publishing market and for the software and hardware publishing world," Dunn said. "[InDesign] really is targeted towards the market that Quark currently has a significant market share in." However, the two programs will not be identical, acording to Dunn. "If we were just like Quark why would anybody want to switch?" she asked.

Features and Compatibility

Unlike Quark, InDesign works with Adobe Acrobat and is able to send PDF files. Currently, Quark users need to launch another application to convert their documents to PDF files, and the process isn't always seamless. In addition, Quark users also often use other Adobe products such as Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.

Again, the documents need to be converted between applications.

"Wouldn't it be nice if we could make that an entire Adobe family with very tight integration with the other Adobe applications?" she asked.

InDesign is built to use native files from these applications - that is, InDesign can use them as is, without any conversions. Similarly, InDesign can open Pagemaker, Word, and even QuarkXPress files. The user interface is designed to be similar to those in the graphics applications, with the expected palettes and navigators.

Users get extensive color management and an array of graphic features, according to Dunn.

The compatibility between applications creates some interesting possibilities. Dunn demonstrated this by turning a word into a group of outlined letters, and filling in the letters with pieces of a photograph. The result looked as if someone cut letters out of the photograph.

With InDesign, you can express your creative ideas with complete freedom," said Dunn, a typesetter by trade. "It is simple to use and you have a lot of power." InDesign can put text around run-arounds, curves, and shapes. This application also lets the user control page and line breaks.

"Some of these features have not been available since the end of the $200,000 dedicated typesetters," Dunn said. "They're certainly never seen on a desktop application. You can control the type, gradients, colors - nearly every detail." Users also have extensive power to control the text in a document. Various portions of the document can have different hyphenation dictionaries, languages, and justification.

One feature that has not been available in any other program is typography control. For instance, InDesign can handle "hung punctuation" - commas, quotation marks, and other symbols hang slightly outside the text box to create the optical illusion of a straight line.

InDesign can also handle multiline composure, which involves slightly shifting the words in several lines of text to get the best possible fit. This is an especially powerful feature for magazines.

The convenient "preflight" feature confirms that all of a job's fonts, color management systems, and links to other files are in order. Then, InDesign can bundle all associated documents, graphics and fonts so that the job isn't delayed at the printer because of missing pieces.

Modular Design Provides

Flexiblity But the new features weren't the only reason that the Adobe programming team decided to start from the bottom up. Because they started with a blank slate, they could use the latest programming concepts - and produced a package that was built with interlocking pieces.

"We made all the features inside InDesign as different modules so they can be altered without affecting the whole enchilada," Dunn said. Many of Quark's extensions are built into InDesign and it is easy to add new features, she said. Since it is a modular design, the program can be customized and altered without recompiling or reworking the entire code base.

It can also be customized very simply — for example, by downloading new modules from the Internet.

Dunn said that InDesign will be available for Macintosh and Windows 98 platforms "and will sell for approximately $700, although there will be some special offers to users of Pagemaker, Illustrator, Photoshop, or QuarkXPress.

Richard Trombly is a technical writer based in Western Massachusetts. He has ten years of teaching experience and several foreign languages under his belt. His hobbies include backpacking, hiking around Europe, and flying his Cessna two-seater. He can be reached at: richard.trombly@the-spa.com.