Imagine you’ve rented a house for several years. You feel the landlord takes too long to fix things and sometimes charges too much. But the house has always been called the finest of its kind. In fact, all the professionals you know five in houses this landlord owns. Now imag- ine that a new landlord builds a house down the block. From the outside, this new house looks incredible — it’s got new features you’ve always wanted, and the rent will be less than what you’re currently paying. The landlord promises to fix things quickly and add new appliances often. Should you pack up and move, or should you just hope that your current landlord will take the clue and change his ways? That’s essentially the dilemma facing QuarkXPress users as Adobe rolls out InDesign (also known by the code name K-2 or, informally, the (Quark Killer), its new page layout and design apphcation for desktop pubhshing professionals.
If you are familiar with Illustrator, PageMaker, or Photoshop, you will feel very much at home with InDesign. The toolbox, palettes, and icons have the same look and feel as those of other Adobe applications. However, recognizing that many fingers are trained to follow QuarkXPress shortcuts, InDesign gives you the option to change keyboard shortcuts to their QuarkXPress equivalents. Instead of pressing Command-D to retrieve a text or a picture, you can switch to a set of shortcuts that uses Command-E (see “Making XPress Users Feel at Home,” p64) for the same function. You can also create your own sets using almost any keystrokes you want, though you can’t remap hard-coded shortcuts, such as those for the magnifying glass tool.
Without question, InDesign has some of the most revolutionary typographic features in all of desktop publishing. The most exciting is multiline composition. Unlike ordinary single-line composition, which can only set text one Une at a time, InDesign’s multiline feature examines a certain number of lines as a group and changes the line breaks accordingly. This dramatically reduces the unwanted rivers of word spacing — the bane of desktop publishing documents (see “Understanding Multiline Composition,” p62).
Another new typographic feature is optical margin alignment, which allows punctuation to hang outside the margin for justified text. The optical kerning looks at the shapes of letters and closes up the space between them. This allows you to kern between different typefaces. Anyone who appreciates fine typography will definitely want to consider using InDesign.
InDesign offers a wide range of export options. You can maintain even the most complicated layouts using Cascading Style Sheets. The Web export can create automatic navigation elements for pages.
Anyone converting InDesign documents into Web pages will also appreciate the Adjust Layout command. This feature, originally found in PageMaker 5, allows you to change the orientation of a document and rearrange the elements on the page. This makes it easy to change a newsletter from a portrait (print) orientation to a landscape (Web) orientation. InDesign can even export Acrobat PDF files, but it doesn’t convert text hnks automatically into Acrobat’s article threads.
Since most designers have an extensive library of documents created in other desktop publishing packages, Adobe has provided a way to convert QuarkXPress 3.3 through 4 or PageMaker 6.5 documents into InDesign files. This feature is excellent for converting style sheets and master pages. However, text often flows irregularly, so plan to spend considerable time cleaning up converted documents.
For many years, one of the great strengths of PageMaker was its ability to coordinate documents in a book and create an index and table of contents. So it is strange that InDesign relies on a third-party plug-in (the $195 Sonar Bookends from Virginia Systems) for indexing,and cannot coordinate styles, page numbers, and colors across documents. Book publishers may not want to move over to InDesign immediately, given these limitations.
Some InDesign features, however, break new ground. For example, it can base master pages (individual page layouts that contain elements common to every page in the document, such as page numbers or title chapters) upon other master pages, or create them directly from document pages. And you can put headers and footers on individual master pages while controlling the rest of the layout on a “master” master page. Another great new feature is the Find/Change command, which searches and alters both character and paragraph attributes such as drop caps, character color, paragraph spacing, indents — even widow and orphan controls.
One of the arguments for switching to InDesign is that since it comes from Adobe, there is a synergy between InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. For example, InDesign can import native Photoshop files, flattening and saving them as TIFF files. It can also read clipping paths in Photoshop files and convert them into InDesign frames.
You can drag and drop Illustrator artwork directly into InDesign. And InDesign can read swatches from Illustrator files. However, there are times when the synergy breaks down between the apphcations. For instance, there is no simple route back from InDesign into either Photoshop or Illustrator, so you can’t easily undo changes to clipping paths or artwork and transfer them back to other Adobe programs. Also, text from Illustrator does not stay editable after you move it into InDesign. Likewise, while InDesign can apply gradients to the fill or stroke of text as Illustrator can, you lose Illustrator gradients when you bring artwork into InDesign.
As beautiful as the InDesign house is on the outside, it’s missing some very basic features. Although there is a pen tool, there’s no text on a path; the Bezier controls are terribly primitive; and yon can’t even select more than one anchor point at a time. Furthermore, InDesign has a nice variety of arrowheads for rules, but it has no way to create a striped or scotch rule and no way to control the gap color between dashes. Unlike QuarkXPress with its powerful Space/Align,
InDesign has only a very simple alignment feature, so there is no way to select several objects and quickly apply a specific amount of space between them. This is such a basic feature of page layout, it’s hard to understand how Adobe left it out. Finally, there is no automatic text wrapping for imported images, so getting text to run around the shape of an image is a convoluted process. First you create a clipping path from the preview of the image, then you apply a runaround to that path. Worse, if you make any changes to the original image, you’ll have to re-create the clipping path.
You may want to avoid using some InDesign features until Adobe fixes them. For instance, if you scale text up or down, the physical size of the text changes, but the point size in the character palette remains the same. This means three different text frames can print slightly different sizes of what appears to be 12-point text. Adobe admits this feature is not working as intended and has promised a fix. Another apparent problem involves using the color palette to apply colors direcdy to InDesign objects or text. These unnamed colors do not appear in Swatches or in the Print dialog box. While this sort of freedom in applying colors is acceptable in an Illustrator program, it can cause production problems in a page layout program.
Finally, InDesign has some onerous system and hardware requirements (Adobe recommends Mac OS 8.5 and 128MB of RAM!), especially since you can comfortably run QuarkXPress 4 on a lowly Power Mac 7200 with System 7.5 and just 32MB of RAM. Also, InDesign ’s requirement of a printer with PostScript Level 2 or later is a problem for anyone who has an ink-jet printer. Adobe recommends such users convert their documents into PDF files and print them with Acrobat.
Very few software packages are perfect in their first version, and InDesign is no exception. Unfortunately for those who expected a monumental leap past the current versions of PageMaker and QuarkXPress, InDesign doesn’t qualify, though it holds great promise. Anyone who wants to improve the look of a document’s typography will want to use InDesign right away. However, others — especially those working with long documents — may not feel comfortable moving to this premiere version. The house doesn’t feel finished. But Adobe promises that InDesign’s modular structure will make future updates and upgrades easy to create. It shouldn’t be long before InDesign is ready for new tenants.
Cohen, Sandee. (December 1999). InDesign. MacAddict. (pgs. 62-64).
At least 48MB of RAM if virtual memory is turned ON (or 96MB of RAM when virtual memory is turned OFF).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
50 / 
2020-03-22 / 
f155657e0fc9eca5a6a81aeeec9f7fa8d6a4858a / 
/ 
Adobe InDesign 1.0.img.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
