What is Adobe InDesign 2?

If you ask desktop-publishing pros and major publications what page-layout program they use, nine out often will say QuarkXPress. But perhaps we should wait and ask them again in a year, InDesign 2.0, Adobe's intended Quark killer, is OS X ready, compatible with all your favorite programs, and chock full of professional utilities and new functions that will pique your curiosity and perhaps inspire you to lay out your next project within its revamped windows.

For Adobe lovers who already worship the likes of Photoshop and Illustrator, converting to InDesign will be a snap. It has recognizable palettes, similar tools, and the familiar nuances of Adobe’s other programs.

InDesign 2.0 offers the ability to open your old QuarkXPress 3.3 to 4.1 files, as well as Adobe PageMaker 6.5X to 7.0 ones, leaving you little excuse not to at least give it a try. Of course, old habits are hard to break, which is why you can set InDesign’s keyboard shortcuts so they’re identical to those of QuarkXPress.

One of the advantages of joining the Adobe matrix is the seamless integration among its sibling programs. An example of this is how InDesign incorporates one of Illustrator’s most popular features, transparency. With this extraordinary function you can layer objects, images, or text even when they contain gradients; you just set the desired percentage of transparency to see through each object to what lies below.

Gone are the days of adding the drop shadow in Photoshop and importing it into your page-layout program, only to realize the shadow isn’t in the right place, so you have to open the layered file in Photoshop again to fix it. Instead, you add your drop shadows or feathering with InDesign, and the effects remain fully editable at all times. Because InDesign preserves the transparency of Photoshop and Illustrator files, you don’t even need a clipping path or layer mask anymore.

InDesign 2.0 is a typographer’s dream; its typesetting controls put Quark’s to shame. Kerning tools come in metric, manual, and optical, providingyou the utmost control over letterspacing — especially useful when you’re combining different fonts. Another feature is the optical margin-alignment control. This allows you to keep characters such as the wily letter W and punctuation marks from hanging outside the text’s margin, giving it a more aligned look. The character- and paragraph-styling palettes allow you to set and save specific styles, and later import them into other documents.

The automatic hyphenation controls provide detailed settings that, for example, allow you to dictate the minimum number of letters a word must have for hyphenation. And the paragraph composer assesses an entire paragraph when deciding where optimal line breaks should occur, providing fewer hyphens and a smoother look overall.

InDesign 2.0 also comes with a snazzy glyph palette, where you can easily find those lost tildes and umlauts you know are lurking under a secret keystroke combination somewhere. This is especially helpful with OpenType fonts, which InDesign now recognizes; these fonts often include a bevy of extra features such as ligatures, swashes, and true fractions.

If you need a page-layout program to design a book, take advantage of InDesign 2.0's long-document features. InDesign can cull various documents and amalgamate them into a Book File that shares styles and swatches. From there, the program can sequentially number the pages and create a table of contents with formatting based on your own paragraph-style settings. Finally, InDesign does the grunt work of building an index, which can range from a simple keyword list to a complex cross-referencing tool.

Another advantage InDesign has over QuarkXPress is the ability to import styled tables from Microsoft Word and Excel. You can also build your own tables with ease. InDesign uses rows and columns to create cells in which you may place text, inline graphics, or other tables.

One of the nicer features of InDesign’s table builder is the ability to import tabdelimited text. In other words, if you import tabbed text from a word processing program into an InDesign table, InDesign will automatically place each chunk of text that follows a tab into its own cell.

Not only can InDesign create print layouts for magazines and newspapers, it also takes the lead by creating Web output in HTML and XML, and by working seamlessly with Adobe GoLive (Quark's Web solution is to start fresh in a new Web Document — it lacks a simple export feature). Other output options include SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and Adobe PDF, including the taggable variety known as eBooks, which contain live links to both the table of contents and the index.

Version 2.0 incorporates the much needed preview mode to show you exactly how the page will print, and offers the ability to print to a non-PostScript printer. You can checkyour font and image usage, as well as color and print settings, in the preflight window.

We're not going to say InDesign is universally better than QuarkXPress — that ultimately depends on your needs. If you’re committed to using the best tool for the job, InDesign 2.0 is rock solid and OS X ready — and quite possibly it spells the end of your love-hate relationship with Quark.

Webber, Leigh. (May 2002). InDesign 2.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 50-51).

Download Adobe InDesign 2 for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 9.1

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver