© 4-12-02 Joel Davies

• Product Name/Version: InDesign 2.0
• OS X ?: Yes!
• Company: Adobe
• URL: http://www.adobe.com
• Category: Print Design and Publishing
• Price: US$699 - $300 rebate for QuarkXpress owners
• Requirements: Mac OS 9.1 or greater / Mac OS 10.1 128MB RAM
• Date of Review: 4/12/02
• Rating: Overall: 4 bounces - Pure Lust

This is part one of a two part review examining InDesign for specific audiences. I am going to start by addressing features and needs targeted to print design veterans.  In the second part of this review and examination, Pierre Igot will examine InDesign 2 from the perspectice of the prosumer who works with InDesign out of the home. Can InDesign 2 capture both audiences?

I know more than a few designers that eyed the coming of InDesign with interest. Version 1.0 was pretty rough around the edges. Later, version 1.5 showed a bit more maturity, with a lot more stability. Finally with 2.0, Adobe has realized InDesign's potential.

If you have several years experience in print design, and are more worried about the pro-level and production features of InDesign, read on...

Don't let the pretty little butterfly fool you. Think Mothra...

Opening Statements: Making the Case

I know what everyone is looking for with InDesign reviews - the magic phrase "Quark Killer."  Frankly, a lot of designers are afraid of switching to InDesign for a variety of reasons: adjusting to a new workflow; the glacial pace of service providers and printers supporting a new platform; and the comfort of Quark's simplicity, and its ubiquitous installation base.

Well, I'm a big believer in evolving standards and technology - and from a straight-up design and user experience standpoint, InDesign is the "Quark Killer" many of us have sought for years.  There, I said it - InDesign isn't just better, it runs circles around Quark - giving you more features (without having to purchase of download extensions), more compatibility with other formats, and more choices for operating systems (it runs great in OSX).

I'm also terribly disappointed, but not terribly surprised at the total lack of innovative new features in Quark 5 - many of which existed in InDesign 1.5.  Right away, I've got to ask you the question: why would you want to support a product that doesn't evolve with new standards and technology, instead of embracing something new - and relevant to today's (and tomorrow's) design world?

The Case for Switching: Features Developed for Professionals

Rather than giving you a laundry list of new features, which can be found here, I'm going to examine those that I found really impressive.  These features are the evidence that Adobe really listens to customer feedback, and addresses the needs of their audience.

It's easy to set the Display performance for a single image - notice the difference in visual quality between these two placed Illustrator documents.

The first feature I put to real use when learning InDesign is one of my biggest pet peeves about Quark. In order to maximize screen redraw speed and performance, layout programs traditionally only show previews of rasterized images and vector graphics placed on pages. This causes two problems: professionally - this can make cropping and placing photos and graphics in Quark a nightmare; and from a teaching perspective, I'd be a rich man if I got a quarter every time a student came to me with "why does my graphic look so bad" questions. I imagine I'm not the only person forced to print multiple proofs just to use as a reference to properly line up minute details in an image with text placed in Quark.

InDesign has a nice little dynamic preference that allows you to control whether you use a low-res 8-bit preview of a graphic, or a crisp anti-aliased preview with correct color. Granted, there are Quark extensions that allow you to actually view graphics, but not at the click of a button. You can set master preferences for these settings, and then customize setting for individual graphics in a document. Just control-click on a graphic and select a different setting from the pull-down menu. If performance is an issue, set it back to a crummy preview when you are done tweaking the graphic.

While I'm on the subject of graphics, transparency support is also quite handy. Some clients have that funky layered looked that can't really be achieved without a lot of trickery in multiple programs when quark is your primary layout tool. Not to mention, if you need to do some funky text effects with transparency - you'll need to do them in Photoshop - forcing you to be aware of how Photoshop handles vector text. In my experience, most designers don't know how to use vector text in Photoshop, create tiffs with text, and get badly pixellated results.

This should look familiar to Illustrator users

InDesign allows you to not only apply transparency to graphics and text, but also supports blending modes (multiply, screen overlay, etc) just like Photoshop. Suddenly, layout becomes quite a bit less ordinary, and quite a bit more flexible.

While I'm on the subject of graphics, I'll take a moment to discuss the feature that really blew me away - compatibility with Photoshop and Illustrator. the fact that you can just place a native .PSD or .AI into InDesign looks really good on paper - the actual practice of not having to export tifs and eps files from Photoshop or vector eps files from Illustrator actually made me squeal with delight. While this feature does not magically absolve designers of good pre-press design tactics and color management, it does allow you to not clog up your hard drive with a ton of tiffs and eps Photoshop files that are just used for final printing.

Use the Paragraph Options to set up the Paragraph Composer...

...by adjusting the justification settings...

...and the hyphenation settings.

Oh, and that transparent background in Photoshop and Illustrator - is still transparent in InDesign - without worrying about clipping paths and alpha channels. Think about that for a few minutes. Never worry about creating a clipping path around someone's hair again. This feature ALONE is worth the switch.

But it's not all about graphics - layout and print design is all about typography. InDesign makes a commitment to good typography that should become the new industry standard. I've always thought Illustrator's type engine and control was second to none - and Adobe just plopped it right into InDesign, with a MAJOR refinement. The character and paragraph palettes in InDesign are pretty much the same as Illustrator's mainstays, but InDesign adds the Adobe Paragraph Composer in the Paragraph palette options - possibly one of the best design tools available in any major application.

The Adobe Paragraph Composer is the one feature that has bugged the eyes of many of our design and news publication students. It essentially evaluates the word spacing, letter spacing, glyph scaling and hyphenation options that you have applied to a paragraph, and then wraps the lines to provide the best looking/reading layout. In "designer-ese" - it will re-wrap a paragraph adjusting kerning and tracking to make the best looking paragraph - avoiding orphans and widows. You can adjust the way InDesign composes these lines by preferring spacing or hyphenation, and adjusting the spacing and hyphenation options.

Composed type looks good - with sensible line breaks.

My students are absolutely thrilled about the prospect of using this feature in newspaper and yearbook production, and I'm really happy with the 24 page document I laid out as a test - I spent less time working with the type in this document than I usually spend reworking paragraphs to avoiding goofy line breaks.

And finally we come to printing and output. I'll cover output very quickly. The PDFs I've made directly from InDesign have been flawless - and have gone to press (to service bureaus without InDesign) with no problems. I've never had a PDF generated from Quark work quite this well on the first try - but then again, printing a PDf from Quark is a bit of a hassle. In InDesign, you just select Export under the File menu, and set up your PDF. Simple. Elegant. Compatible. The way it ought to be.

How compatible you ask? I sent a really nasty PDF off to a press last week with multiple Pantone colors used on some pages, and CMYK on other pages. I embedded lots of fonts and images - both vector and rasterized. I was later told it ripped straight to film without a hitch. FROM WINDOWS.

If you are like me, you also have a couple of standard ways that you print documents for production or proofs. I have the full-page no marks style, and the scaled down to fit with marks style. InDesign has this fabulous extra function called "printer styles" that lets you save multiple sets of parameters - marks, scale, output options (actually, anything you can customize) for every printer you use. Instead of going through all the setup steps to print a proof every time you create a new document - you can set up general styles, such as "letter sized, with full printer's marks, scaled to fit the page," that you can simply select anytime you need it. If you need to print a different way - set it up ONCE - and then use the style again and again for any document you wish to print.

It should be no surprise that an Adobe product knows how to make press-ready PDFs.

Aside from printing to your own printers and making PDFs, you will need to get everything ready for a service bureau sooner or later. I used to use Flightcheck to make sure I hadn't done anything stupid in a document - such as forgetting to convert graphics to the proper color settings. InDesign has a wonderful feature under the File menu called "Preflight" that has all the features you need in a good preflight application. It creates a summary of the document including windows to display any font issues, colors and inks used, graphic and link issues, and print settings. After viewing and fixing any problems, you can then create a report with instructions for your printer or service bureau and press the magic "Package" button - which collects a document, the linked graphics, your report, and GET THIS - all the fonts used (take that, Quark) in a nice little (or huge, depending on your document) folder that can be loaded onto your preferred media and sent out the door.

Add in the fact that Adobe actually believes in giving their customers support - unlike the competition, in my experience, and you have plenty of reasons to make the switch. I can't make it any clearer - InDesign has picked up a big, stainless steel gauntlet and smacked Quark right across the face with InDesign 2. I'm not saying it's perfect - but it's definitely a better layout solution than quark - except in one area.

Closing Statements: a Call to Arms

The one drawback to switching to InDesign is the issue of service bureau support. In my limited experience, a lot of places are slowly beginning to "investigate" InDesign - but many are frankly taking their own sweet time. I'm sure there are valid reasons for this - such as taking production people off production to train them on new software, and hey, time IS money - BUT...

...these places are called SERVICE bureaus for a reason. It's not like I'm asking them to support some obscure piece of junk - this is not only Adobe software, this is a big contender in the market. Get with the program. And service bureaus won't, unless we designers put our foot down and tell - not ask - them to support our workflow.

The bottom line is this - InDesign is the best print design and layout solution available. Period. End of discussion. Make the switch. Hey, Adobe is even running a 300.00 dollar rebate for QuarkXpress owners. Of course - the design community is the jury on this case - we shall see whether the Quark Killer gets any justice.

Rating: PURE LUST

Case Closed.

-Joel Davies

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