Adobe InDesign

This next-generation app mixes the best of PageMaker, Photoshop and Illustrator. But is it the Quark-killer Adobe is hoping for?

Product: InDesign

From:  Adobe, www.adobe.com (Announced Mar. 2, 1999; shipping as of Aug. 31. InDesign 1.5, a US$99 upgrade, was announced March 13, 2000)

For: Windows 98/NT or later; PowerMac with System 8.5 or later.

Price: About US$699. Upgrades available. Contact Adobe for details.

Pros: Optical Kerning and Multi-Line composition provide better typographical control than any other DTP package. Excellent HTML+CSS output. Automatic creation of sophisticated clipping paths. Interface and commands will be familiar to users of Adobe or Quark products. Unlimited Undos. Imports QuarkXPress 3.3, and PageMaker 6.5 documents. "Pre-flight" checking and packaging. InDesign can draw full-resolution images on screen, zoom between 5%-4000%, supports multiple document windows, and can parse native Illustrator files, PDF files - it can even support placing native PostScript files (.PS)! Just drop a .PS file into InDesign and the PostScript-based display engine takes over. Moreover, this display model is used on both Mac and Wintel platforms, so moving files around in a cross-platform environment is very easy (even line breaks are retained, because the H&J is identical).

Cons: Limited support for RGB image files. No built-in indexing, trapping or long document features in v1.0. InDesign does not support Korean, Japanese and Chinese double-byte character sets. Oddly, the 'Filters Readme' file installed with the product (dated, July 28, 1999) states that double-byte character sets are supported. However, this feature was apparently taken out before the product was released. No support for non-PostScript printers in the Mac version. (The Windows version supports standard Windows printer drivers, however.)

Strongest Competitor: QuarkXPress 4.1 (which, incidentally, can export files compatible with InDesign, using the "Save as v3.3" export option)

If you are a PageMaker fan tired of getting sand kicked in your face by QuarkXPress users, get ready to pump up with InDesign, a publishing program from Adobe with enough muscle to keep virtually any DTP beach bully at bay. InDesign appears to be, more than anything, an attempt by Adobe to take back the high end of the category it virtually created way back in the mid-'80s with PageMaker (and yes, we are aware that PageMaker was not the first desktop publishing program. Do a search of our web site for the words Manhattan Graphics to find out the rest of that story.)

At any rate, InDesign, previously known as K2, isn't some mere rewrite of PageMaker. PageMaker, since its inception, used a pasteboard metaphor onto which text and graphics could be poured or placed as desired. Adobe's chief competitor, Quark, meanwhile, employed a so-called frames-based metaphor for its text placement that ultimately proved more favorable to many designers (especially those who had accidentally clicked on one of PageMaker's text columns and pressed Delete. In PageMaker, that text was gone, gone, gone; in QuarkXPress, it would simply re-flow the text to the next column. InDesign uses these Quark style frames, but enhances them with a variety of fancy edges, including rounded and cut-out corners, sophisticated multi-colour gradients and strokes.

Indeed, Quark fans are clearly a target -- InDesign not only provides a set of shortcut keys that exactly match those in QuarkXpress, but InDesign actually loads QuarkXPress files (versions 3.3 through 4.04). It also loads files created in PageMaker 6.5. It does not, however, load XTensions for QuarkXPress (or plug-ins for PageMaker, for that matter.) The import functions worked well in our tests, although we'd urge caution -- Adobe says text flow will change.

But it's when it comes to the fancy stuff that InDesign leaves QuarkXPress in the dust. Images or gradients inside text? No problem -- you can even edit text after a gradient or stroke has been applied. Creating a clipping path around an imported Photoshop graphics? Automatic handled by InDesign; the program, unlike QuarkXPress, bases its edge-detection routines on the actual resolution of the image, not the screen representation.

There are some interesting text handling features, too. The program provides four types of kerning, including an "optical kerning" system that, when used on a left margin, moves letters such as "T" and "V" a little to the left to more gracefully balance to text block. Single-character ligatures such as "fi" are automatically supported and even be spell-checked or re-edited as if a standard character pair. There's a unique feature called Multi-Line composition that looks at several lines above the line you are working on, to help eliminate words stranded on a separate line or page. These features provide InDesign users with better typographical control than any other DTP package currently available, bar none. And (finally!) character-based styles are supported, as opposed to PageMaker's old-fashioned Paragraph styles.

There are a few tricky features that could potentially prove troublesome, at least until a Quark or PageMaker user becomes familiar with InDesign's new paradigm. For example, there is a polygon feature that can create anything from a triangle to a starburst. However, if you use it to create a box and then rotate that box 45 degrees, any text typed into that box will also be rotated 45 degrees. There are solutions (using the Pen tool to create a diamond shape, for example), but this and other new features will take a little getting used to, despite the program's familiar tool palettes and interface.

The program provides many of the features we've seen in Adobe's other programs: unlimited undo and redo, customizable palettes, document wide layers, the above-mentioned Bezier pen tool and native import of Photoshop, Illustrator and PDF (Portable Document Format) files. You can also create compound paths from multiple objects and, if you want to reuse items, quickly add items or entire pages to a Library. And InDesign can resize a whole group of objects at once (and unlike QuarkXpress 4, undo this step later, if desired!)

PDF import and export support is nicely implemented in InDesign -- and that's probably a good thing, because we continue to be amazed at how long it's taking Adobe to add even rudimentary colour-separation capabilities to its Acrobat family of products. InDesign makes good use of the color management system profiles that can be embedded in Photoshop files. Oddly, though, the program doesn't provide special support of Adobe's own Multiple Master fonts.

There are some other important features missing, too: the program lacks support for TOC, indexing, imposition, database import and footnoting. These, the company hopes, will be provided by third parties building plug-ins for the program, as many developers have done for QuarkXPress. Already, some developers have announced InDesign plug-ins, including a much-needed Table Editor. Version 1.5 of InDesign, announced in March, 2000, is expected to add trapping and text-on-a-path features similar to those already present in QuarkXPress.

Multiple Master Pages are a nifty feature of InDesign. You can, for example, specify a Master Page and then apply its attributes to another Master Page. Changing the "Master Master Page," if you will, changes its subordinate Master Page.

The program's Paragraph Palette provides support for Drop Caps, including the ability to specify more than one character to be "dropped" -- a vast improvement over the awful system PageMaker users had to endure. Alternately, InDesign allows you to turn any character into a graphic, which may then be nested inside a text box. In fact, any graphic or text item can be nested in this way.

InDesign's weakest area is its apparent lack of support for RGB images, such as the ubiquitous JPG files that are increasingly common in this web-centric era. (Apple's just-announced ColorSync 2.6, however, adds support for JPEG and GIF.) In our tests of InDesign's colour-separation output and pre-flighting features, it flagged RGB files as problems, but did nothing to fix them. For that, you'll still need a program such as Photoshop, FreeHand or even the ancient Aldus PrePrint that was once the basis for PageMaker's color separation capabilities.

InDesign's Web export capabilities, however, are nothing short of stellar. It supports Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and recent HTML specifications, allowing text to specify custom fonts, leading, and even allows text to overlay graphics. The only notable omission we lamented was an apparent lack of support for coloured text-boxes. Fortunately, this can be fixed in seconds in virtually any HTML editor.

Of course, printing is an essential part of any DTP program and it looks like Adobe will have fewer problems here than Quark did with its much reviled 4.0 upgrade to QuarkXPress. InDesign aims to speed the printing process by sending only the visible data in a masked TIFF file to a printer. It uses -- and requires -- the Adobe-codeveloped printer driver in Windows 98/NT or, on the Mac platform, Mac OS 8.5 minimum.

Conclusion:

InDesign is a major step forward and, as such, has fairly hefty hardware requirements. Adobe recommends a Pentium II/300 as the minimum platform for running the PC version of the program; the Mac edition requires a Power PC (603 or better) Mac.

Overall, our tests of the program have been quite encouraging. Its PDF, Quark (3.3 - 4.04) and PageMaker 6.5 import functions worked well, despite occasional translation problems (runarounds in Quark documents seem to be a problem, for example), and its interface is nicely intuitive, especially to those familiar with other Adobe products.

As noted in our feature on performing color separations of PDF files, placing a PDF document in Adobe InDesign yielded better results than with any other program we tried. The file was imported and displayed very quickly and the image imported perfectly, complete with multipage and cropping options. Adobe advises use of Adobe PostScript driver 4.3 or newer and a PostScript printer that supports in-RIP trapping for best results.

With performance like this, InDesign should do much to restore Adobe's reputation as a leading developer of DTP applications on the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Note, however, that the two versions are not strictly identical in their feature sets. The Macintosh version, for example, is unable to print to non-PostScript printers (although PDF export provides a possible workaround); the Windows release, as noted in the InDesign literature, does not share this limitation.

It should also be noted that InDesign is not an upgrade to PageMaker. That program has been given a business twist and is now being readied for a summer release as "PageMaker Plus," complete with a collection of office-oriented templates, wizards and a US$499 price.

Quark, as expected, countered Adobe's announcements with a pre-announcement of QuarkXPress 5.0 at the Seybold conference in Boston on March 3rd, 1999. The company at that time said QuarkXPress 5.0 would ship later in 1999. And, as so often happens in the software world, this schedule slipped. The company then showed off a beta release of the new version at the Drupa conference in May 2000 and claimed the final release would ship by the end of the year 2000. It didn't. Now, the company looks likely to ship the program a full two years late -- a delay that's causing a great deal of concern from Mac users, in particular, who are incensed that the update will not be "Carbonized" for compatibility with Apple's OS X, due March 24th.

Adobe, meanwhile, is on the road showing off features planned for the next version of InDesign. Among the highlights:

• Built-in Drop Shadows
• Support for transparency on any object, both via setting opacity values or by use of transfer modes (overlay, screen, hard light, etc...).
• Support for native transparent Photoshop and TIFF files, including those with soft edged alpha channels and layer masks.
• Built-in feathering capability to create soft, transparent edges on any object in InDesign - text, vector artwork, raster images, and native InDesign objects.

Our experiences with InDesign have been largely positive. Despite a nagging sensation that some operations are less speedy than they should be, the program has proven very robust in heavy use. We recently used version 1.5 to produce a 40-page, all digital publication, with dozens of placed PDF advertisements, high-resolution TIFFs and JPEGs, and other demanding files. We did some of the work on a PC running Windows Me, then moved the files over to a Mac for final output. In short, it worked.

Adobe is offering a 60-day free trial version of Adobe InDesign 1.5 - available for download from its Web site.

For Further Reading

• Adobe: InDesign product info
• Macworld review: Adobe Answers XPress; InDesign Challenges Quark's Page-Layout Supremacy
• Adobe: InDesign Printing and PDF support
• www.macnn.com: User comments on InDesign 1.5 and an InDesign 1.5 feature list
• Blueworld:.InDesign mailing list