| A promotional team from Adobe Systems is currently touring the US presenting a first look at their brand spanking new page layout and design software called InDesign. Yesterday, along with 500+ eager prepress professionals and graphic designers, I had a peek at the awesome power of the beta page layout product here in Austin, Texas.
Granted, I'm an online stock trader and not a production artist, but I have had enough run-ins with Quark to know that it sucks and PageMaker is no picnic either. Besides, I've been browsing for the ultimate app in which to compose my profusely illustrated new book, "The Apple Trader's Guide to the Online Universe of Investing". InDesign fits the bill perfectly.
Adobe describes the product in their literature as, "a new, state-of-the-art page layout program that delivers unprecedented creative freedom, productivity and precision, while integrating seamlessly with Adobe's other leading design programs."
But that's not the half of it. InDesign, according to the presentation, is 100% new code, pure and simple. The entire house of add-on cards that was PageMaker 6.x has been totally scrapped for a completely new object-oriented structure. Yet, the engineers wisely chose to preserve the familiar Adobe interface in this new code.
The basic InDesign program is more like a sci-fi docking core for plug-ins than a basic page layout program. Adobe is planning far into next century with InDesign's primary application which weighs in at the remarkably feather-light weight of 1.8 MB! Every function is handled by plug-ins and of the dozen or so demonstrated; none was bigger than 270 K and most were much smaller. While this may not be representative of the full range of plug-ins, it certainly shows a good start. It also shows that Adobe is sensitive to what has kept Quark as the application of choice for design professionals, and that is Quark Xtensions. Many publishing firms have as many as hundreds of Xtensions that have been custom designed to fit their needs. That ability to customize could be key in winning over Quark customers, though the argument that Quark users have too much invested in their Xtensions to make a switch to anything else will rear its familiar head.
The new dock and plug in paradigm of InDesign makes this program almost infinitely expandable as Adobe and third parties develop more features for years to come. Although the beta version seems to already have more functionality than the current competition's latest offering.
Adobe has put a lot of stock into InDesign, planning for the app to be the illusive "Quark Killer" that so many companies, including Adobe, have claimed to have in the past. BTW, the Adobe people in this seminar never directly said that much, yet it was clearly written all over their faces.
The list of features has convinced this reviewer that they may be right. I don't know where to start. Much of this futuristic program is anticipating developments in output quality that just doesn't exist today. The precision of text and object placement seems to be far beyond the reach of anything out there.
The Adobe shocktroops said that InDesign will be available "sometime in the summer of 1999", then they dodged questions on a more specific time frame. One unnamed Adobe source did point out to me that summer does last till late September. Make of that what you will. The price is the usual $699 for high end page layout packages but Adobe will be selling InDesign for a special introductory (read: Quark-competing) price of $299 for a few weeks after the final release, whenever that is.
There are so many cool features to this program (I'm clueless as to what the real pre-press pros need), that the rest of this preview is a rapid fire ramble, in no rational order, of what struck me, as an amateur, as being cool. I'm sure I missed bunch.
InDesign has an obscene zoom capacity; a 5% to 4000% view which can be utilized via the navigator window or the classic magnifying tool, and InDesign smoothes both text and images as it zooms in so you aren't just looking at enlarged pixels. At 4000% zoom, due to something called "Cool Type" and Adobe Graphic Manager, the page image is razor crisp. I readily admit that I don't know anything about Cool Type, but the adobe folks seem proud of it.
Why would anyone need 4000% zoom? Well, you might be working at the largest page size, which at 18-ft. square, is big enough for a billboard. The smallest page size is 1/16th of an inch. You can have two or more views of a document open at the same time, and work in either or both. The radical zoom capacity of this program actually offers useful new ways in which one might work on document.
InDesign sports 300 levels of undo! Cool. That caused a pre-press worker in my aisle to literally start to cry and babble something about his career while his co-workers calmed him.
InDesign has document wide layers that work much like PhotoShop layers. Speaking of PhotoShop you can drag and drop Native PhotoShop and Illustrator files with all layers intact and fully functional to InDesign. Illustrator files remain fully editable inside InDesign. Every vector component stays discrete. And when you are ready to go to press you can crop the images on each layer to their frame, thus saving on final file size.
You can also place pages from PDF files as linked graphics. InDesign is essentially a PDF distiller, since files can be saved directly to PDF format, and includes a variety of save options, including a choice of compression levels, font embedding, password, and color conversion. Adobe, like Apple with OS X, is using the PDF format in the low-level functions of their programs.
The message I got from the seminar is that PDF will eventually displace EPS as the standard everywhere. Although, InDesign can read EPS files as well.
Mindful of the marketshare of Quark, InDesign will open QuarkXPress 3.3-4.0x files as well as PageMaker 6.5 files.
Here's one cool function I'll just quote from the handout. "Set up multiple master pages in documents, making it easier to apply key design elements consistently. Even base one master page on another. Then any changes made to the ‘based-on' (or parent) master page will ripple through the ‘subordinate' (or child) master page for efficient updating."
You can use any type of shape, even converted text as frames to hold text and graphics content. From the handout literature, "Create vivid layered designs by pasting a frame within a frame within a frame. Then subselect and manipulate nested frames and their content to get the look you want." You can also convert clipping paths to editable frames or combine multiple bezier paths to create odd frames.
You can edit text in almost any situation. Shear, bezier, strokes, flipped backwards, even filled with gradient, do whatever and the text remains editable. The crowd oooh'd and ahh'd at that cool function.
InDesign has a cool feature called optical margin alignment which will allows you to hang punctuation outside the margin with a mere keystroke! It uses Cool Type and AGM to visualize the page layout from the eye's point of view rather than just dumb pica crunching. More tears from the emotional guy in my aisle.
InDesign has a solid pre-flight check function, and in case of a crash, InDesign has a document recovery function that really works, at least according to Adobe folks. Unfortunately and fortunately at the same time, the Adobe demonstrator had a chance to show us how this feature worked in a real life situation.
Another cool feature is the multi-line composer which can look ahead in a body of text as many as thirty lines before it decides where to place line breaks and justification. Drop caps are as easy as choosing how many lines you want the cap to drop and it's done.
You can edit your keyboard shortcuts and export your custom shortcuts to any other InDesign user. InDesign even comes with a Quark shortcut set so the learning curve is lessened for Quark users, or you can use the default shortcuts, which match those of PhotoShop and Illustrator.
InDesign is fully compliant with AppleScript and one Adobe spokesman seemed to see a business opportunity here for capable AppleScripters.
InDesign comes complete with 13 languages and 20 dictionaries with spell check and they don't cost anything extra.
…And that's just the stuff I remember.
As I said in the beginning, I am not a publishing professional, but I was in a room with over 500 raving publishing professional lunatics. These people were excited, vocal, and emotional throughout the presentation. Many have pronounced doom for Adobe's effort to displace Quark, some have even scoffed, but if the audience I was with is any indication, those pronouncements will prove incorrect and Adobe will have a smashing success with this product.
InDesign is the first totally new, must-have app that was developed completely inhouse at Adobe in many years. It proves that John Warnock and his gang of code slingers still rules the graphic design world from their Mountain View roost and probably will continue to do so for many years to come.
You can send your comments to Wes.
For Further Information:
http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/indesign/printwp.html
Adobe
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