• Product Name/Version: InDesign 2.0
• OS 9/OS X ?: Both
• 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: 5/24/02
• Rating: Overall: 4 bounces - Pure Lust

Joel Davies recently provided Applelust readers with Part One of our collective review of Adobe InDesign 2.0. As indicated in his review, he adopted the approach of the “design veteran” that he is, while I will focus more on using InDesign as a non-specialist, but experienced Mac user. I am not a professional designer and have little training in design, but, over the years, as a Mac software expert and someone with a bit of an eye for typography and other design issues, I have built up my own clientele of institutions and individuals who need my skills to design professional-looking materials at a reasonable cost.

I have been using PageMaker and, in the past couple of years, InDesign to design and produce pamphlets, flyers, program guides, PDF files and academic and literary reviews for people in my community. And I have dealt with several local print shops. Due to InDesign’s reasonable pricing and familiar Adobe interface, the application is, in many respects, the ideal tool for people like me — and I have never really been tempted to switch to Quark Xpress or even give it a try. I know that many designers and printers swear by it and couldn’t live without several highly specialized Xpress plug-ins — but we are talking about a different league of users here. Graphic design is not my specialty, it is something that I do on the side, in a pseudo-professional capacity.

This being said, I do have needs and demands, and I was interested to see how well InDesign 2.0 for Mac OS X responded to them. To me, switching from PageMaker to InDesign 1.x was (obviously for Xpress users, no doubt) already a big leap forward, but, as Joel said in his review, earlier versions of InDesign did have issues that would get in the way and make the user long for the next upgrade.

Performance

The first important aspect for people like me, who cannot afford to purchase a new Mac every 6 months and therefore do not necessarily have the latest, most powerful Mac on which to run their applications, is performance.

Earlier versions of InDesign were definitely on the slow side. Even InDesign 1.5, running either in Mac OS 9 or under Classic in Mac OS X, was still a bit of a slug for seemingly simple tasks. It was usable, but made you long for smoother running and all-round faster operations.

As well, the transition to Mac OS X was a bit of a concern to me, as, with many applications, it has been synonymous with more sluggishness, some of which is undoubtedly caused by the OS itself, but the fact is that third-party Mac developers themselves — and not just Apple’s own programmers — are still in the process of learning how to fine-tune their applications so that they run under OS X as quickly and as smoothly as possible.

I now have been using the latest version of InDesign for OS X (Adobe recently released a 2.0.1 update) on my Mac running the latest version of Mac OS X (10.1.4) for a while, and I am happy to report that overall performance is indeed very good. In fact, although I do not have the resources to do the extensive testing that would be required, I seriously feel that InDesign 2.0 is already, at this stage, faster under Mac OS X than InDesign 1.x ever was under Mac OS 9 on the same machine.

An OS X version of an application that is already, at this early stage in the life of Mac OS X, faster than its OS 9 predecessor is indeed very good news.

Interface

The second issue for me, as a user of Mac OS X exclusively, is how successful Adobe has been at carbonizing InDesign and making it comply with the standards of the Aqua interface.

First of all, one should really commend Adobe for having chosen — unlike some other prominent Mac developers that shall remain nameless — to continue to support, in all the new versions of its applications, the many Mac users that still use Mac OS 9. Just like Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10, and GoLive 6, the version of InDesign 2 that is installed on your hard drive runs perfectly well in both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X.

The trade-off, it seems, is that Adobe has chosen to give lower priority to the adoption of some of Aqua’s trademark features across the board. For example, you will not find any “sheets” in InDesign 2 or other OS X-ready Adobe applications. The “Save As…” and “Print…” dialogs and other dialogs (such as “Place…”) that should rightfully be attached to their corresponding document window as sheets are still independent, modal dialog windows that float above everything and require immediate attention.

InDesign also does not use the Font Palette and other advanced Mac OS X features that, at this point in time, seem to be reserved for Cocoa applications exclusively.

On the other hand, InDesign fully complies with other aspects of the Aqua interface. When InDesign is a background application and you click on an InDesign document window, for example, InDesign only brings that particular document window to the foreground, which is the correct behavior in Aqua. (Some Mac users would like the option to revert to the old Mac OS 9 behavior by default in this case, but I really think that this document-centered approach is much better than the old behavior and that people should get used to it.)

InDesign also provides a high level of flexibility when it comes to customizing your work environment. You can, like in other Adobe programs, reorganize your various palettes at will, hiding the ones that you do not need and combining in a multiple-tab palette the ones you want to keep together (or, conversely, separating a tab from other tabs in a multiple-tab palette and turning it into its own, independent palette if you need it to be readily accessible).

One feature in InDesign 2 that I also love is the ability to customize keyboard shortcuts. As you can see in the screen shot below, you can easily change all predefined keyboard shortcuts in InDesign, add your own, and create different sets of shortcuts for different projects.

Keyboard Shortcuts in InDesign 2

Overall, even though it’s missing some key Aqua features such as dialog sheets, InDesign does really feel like an OS X application, while retaining a powerful, yet easy-to-understand interface that will still be very familiar to both users of earlier versions of InDesign and users of other Adobe applications.

Cool Typography Features

The really exciting stuff in InDesign is the advanced power that it brings to the user, without requiring heaps of experience or prior knowledge.

For example, InDesign 2’s typography features are truly excellent, and make it a world-class design tool. InDesign 2 offers, for example, an option for what it calls “Optical Margin Alignment”. Optical Margin Alignment, in the words of InDesign’s own extensive on-line help, “controls whether punctuation marks (such as periods, commas, quotation marks, and dashes) and edges of letters (such as W and A) hang outside the text margins”, so that the type looks aligned. See for yourself:

Optical Margin Alignment

Using Optical Margin Alignment is an easy way to improve the aspect of your text, while letting InDesign do most of the work. In the same vein, the “Adobe Paragraph Composer” feature “considers a network of breakpoints for an entire paragraph, and thus can optimize earlier lines in the paragraph in order to eliminate especially unattractive breaks later on. Paragraph composition results in more even spacing with fewer hyphens.”

As well, InDesign’s “Optical Kerning” feature “adjusts the spacing between adjacent characters based on their shapes” and can improve the look of text written in a font with minimal built-in kerning or no kerning at all. Consider the “Wa” pair of letters in the text below before and after optical kerning is applied:

Optical Kerning

InDesign’s many typography features also include support for OpenType fonts, advanced hyphenation options, and a glyph palette for those hard-to-remember special accented characters and others:

Glyphs Palette

As well, a handy contextual menu gives you quick access to many special characters that can help you make your text look better:

Caption for one

Tables

InDesign now includes a table-building feature. I doubt that many mourned the passing of the awful table building tool that they used to ship with PageMaker (which ran as a separate application), and Adobe seems to have learnt its lesson. InDesign 2’s Table palette is indeed much more user-friendly and powerful:

Table Palette

InDesign is also supposed to be able to import formatted tables directly from Microsoft Word documents, which should ensure that all the work done by writers in Word using tables in their documents is not necessarily lost when they send their files to the designer.

As a test, I created a fairly simple table in Word:

Table in MS Word

I then placed the Word document in an InDesign layout:

MS Word table imported into InDesign

As you can see, the import process still leaves a little bit to be desired — but, truth be told, it’s nothing that a few additional steps in the Table palette cannot easily fix, for a perfectly acceptable result:

Imported table fixed

Similarly, InDesign 2 can also import Microsoft Excel tables directly, or work from tab-delimited text.

Another important bit of news for French-speaking users of Microsoft Word and InDesign is that Adobe appears to have finally fixed the bug that used to strip French Word and RTF documents (when placing them in an InDesign publication) of all their non-breaking spaces, replacing them with ordinary spaces and forcing you to restore the non-breaking spaces manually with a sequence of search/replace operations. (Non-breaking spaces are essential in French typography.) Now, as far as I can tell, non-breaking spaces are preserved.

“Smart Document” Features

There is a whole slew of other features in InDesign 2 that make it much more appropriate for designing large documents with dozens of pages than its predecessors (including PageMaker and earlier versions of InDesign) ever were.

For example, for people designing books with chapters with different headers but identical footers, the ability to define a new master page based on an existing master page is simply a godsend. It was already available in the previous version of InDesign, but it’s worth mentioning here again, for all those who are considering a move from PageMaker in OS 9 to InDesign in OS X.

InDesign 2 also brings back much-needed “book” features that were missing from earlier versions of the application, including a tool for tables of contents and indexes, and the ability to use several separate InDesign documents as sections in a “Book” file.

For users familiar with Microsoft Word, InDesign 2 even offers a feature that bears more than a little resemblance to Word’s ability to divide a document into “sections”, with their own layout and numbering options. InDesign has a feature that is also called “Sections” and that enables you to divide a single InDesign 2 document into chapters with their own page numbering scheme. Everything can be done through the “Pages” palette, where section changes appear as small down-pointing black triangles above page icons:

Sections in Pages palette

In the example above, a new section begins at page 5, which is actually numbered page “A”, and subsequent pages are numbered with letters. Double-clicking on the triangle opens the dialog on the left, which lets you change your options or remove the section change altogether.

InDesign 2 even does a decent job of importing existing footnotes/endnotes in Word documents, which is good news to any designer who has to deal with documents from the academic world, where the use of such notes is obviously very common. InDesign does not have its own footnote/endnote feature, however, so that such notes need to be placed manually. Third-party plug-in products for InDesign for footnote/endnote management are available (see example here).

You can also add automatic page numbers to a page for what Adobe calls “story jumps”, i.e. references such as “story continued on page XX”, where XX is a number referring to a page elsewhere in the document. Using this feature, you can add dynamic cross-references in your document that will be automatically updated if you make subsequent changes to your publication that might cause your stories to re-flow and referenced page numbers to change.

This being said, InDesign (without additional plug-ins) is still no match for the rich feature set of a program such as Adobe’s own FrameMaker, which provides more advanced “smart document” features. Unfortunately, at this point, the latest version of FrameMaker has not been carbonized for OS X, and Adobe has not officially announced a release date for an OS X-native release of FrameMaker.

Much, Much More

There are, of course, many more features of InDesign 2 that would deserve a mention, including its multiple language support, its Preview mode and ability to display multiple views of a single document, its multiple undos (sequences of up to several hundred commands can be undone, depending on available RAM), and much, much more.

When it comes with compatibility with Microsoft Office, however, based on the feedback that I have received from Adobe, it appears that InDesign 2 is as good as it gets. The future of Adobe publishing is markedly geared towards XML, and if you have additional needs in terms of interoperability between Microsoft Office and InDesign, you will probably realize that a move towards an XML-based workflow is the better answer. Whether or when Microsoft will bring full XML compliance to office computing in Mac OS X is, of course, another question. But really, with InDesign 2, I feel that we have little reason to complain. Adobe has fixed the most glaring bugs and added support for Office-formatted tables, while retaining a good level of support for style sheets and smart document features such as footnotes. If you have needs that go beyond this, you are probably relying on the notoriously unreliable Microsoft Office suite too much for page layout features.

In InDesign 2, Adobe no longer relies on the proprietary QuickHelp application, and instead uses a web browser-based help feature, that uses HTML and JavaScript in your browser of choice. (It does not use Apple’s own Help Viewer as its browser.) The only major complaint I have with this move is that the JavaScript-based search feature is markedly slower than searching in QuickHelp used to be.

All in all, the excellent news about this review of InDesign 2 and its complement by my colleague Joel Davies is that they only really scratch the surface with respect to InDesign’s feature set and powerful tools. Using InDesign 2 for OS X is indeed a very pleasant and productive experience.

NOTE: Adobe also has an impressive 35-page PDF file detailing all the new features in InDesign 2.0. Very convenient if you need to convince your boss to order the upgrade for you.

-Pierre Igot

What do you think? Talk about it in our Forums...