Innovation in DTP
Essay by: Marc Zeedar

Where's the beef, Adobe? Marc attacks the lackluster InDesign and brainstorms on the future of page layout software.

Okay, so most of you have heard about Adobe's new page layout program, InDesign. It's the so-called "Quark Killer" that Adobe's written from the ground up. Lots of new bells and whistles, including everything XPress and PageMaker can do now plus fancy graphical things no current program allows.

Woopee.

First, let me admit that my comments are based on what I've read about the program. InDesign hasn't been released yet and I haven't used it or even seen it. I've read the MacWeek articles, Adobe propaganda, and heard user and viewer comments from the Seybold unveiling. My opinions may change once I get my hands on the real thing.

Second, just to put my biases in the right perspective: I adore Macromedia FreeHand, love Photoshop, hate Illustrator, abhor Quark, and find PageMaker comfortable (though limited and irritatingly unstable). I manage the popular PageMaker Scripting Center in my spare time.

So what's wrong with InDesign? A lot.

Adobe has lately been on a kick to redesign all their programs so they conform to the same interface. They've rewritten Illustrator and PageMaker to match the Photoshop Look.

Frankly, while elements of this are laudable, in practice the idea stinks. Things that are the same in different programs, like Copy and Paste, should be the same in both programs. That makes sense. But object-oriented drawing is so different from bitmap editing, trying to give the two identical interface implementations is crazy. Throw page layout into the mix and you've got something really nutty.

The best interface is one that's 100% appropriate to the task at hand. The inherent metaphors for various tasks are different and shouldn't be identical, even if similar. Many times similar is more confusing than different. Have you ever driven a car that almost worked like one you're familiar with? It's far more irritating than a car that's completely different.

PageMaker's been the interface champ for years. I taught PageMaker to journalism students for a number of years and was amazed at how quickly they caught on. Complete computer neophytes were laying out pages in a matter of hours. I rarely had to explain the same thing twice, and it was only the more esoteric features (like activating automatic page numbering) that I had to explain.

But Adobe went with Photoshop's interface. Photoshop is arguably Adobe's finest program, but nearly unintelligible by novice users. Photoshop is the king of retouching because it offers power: there are about 10 ways to do just about anything and in 10 years of constant use you couldn't try every combination of functions. Just teaching my students how to scan a photo involved me creating a multi-page step-by-step diagram. (Today, of course, much of that could be automated into an action.)

InDesign is not only based on the dubious Photoshop/Illustrator model, it incorporates much of the Quark Way of Doing Things. Now, granted, a lot of people use Quark and are comfortable with it. But that's because most haven't used anything else. Few converts to Quark from PageMaker will tell you that Quark's easier to use. They will tell you they love certain Quark features (like built-in gradients) and the painful Quark Way is one of the sacrifices one must make for power.

That's crap.

I don't think the user should have to suffer to gain ability. Granted, some things are complicated. Radical special effects in Photoshop, for instance, can involve multiple layers, a series of channels operations, and a number of filters. But Adobe's made great progress in simplifying the most common special effects. In Photoshop 5, for instance, adding a drop shadow to some text is as simple as specifying some parameters in a dialog box. (Compare that to the manual way of Photoshop 2!)

When I first heard of InDesign (then called "K2"), I was excited. Even the most ardent XPress lovers complain about Quark's bizarre modal interface, where having the wrong tool selected invalidates your action (i.e. you can't import a picture with the item tool selected -- only the content tool, and you can't delete an object with the content tool -- only the item tool). On the opposite end, even the most ardent PageMaker lovers were expressing concern that the former Aldus product was growing long in the tooth, becoming bulkier and less stable with each new release.

With InDesign, Adobe had the chance to right all the wrongs of PageMaker's initial design. They could create a new DTP engine from the ground up that would be ready for the 21st century, not one invented in the 1980's for use on a 9" Mac Plus screen. Since Adobe owns FrameMaker, I figured much of Frame's famous long-document and auto-formatting tools would be incorporated into InDesign. And most important, Adobe could get Quark where it really hurt by making InDesign not only more powerful than XPress, but much, much, much easier to use!

Then I saw the first screen shots of InDesign. Wow, and I thought FreeHand was palette-heavy! Worst of all, Adobe's using those ugly huge palettes from Illustrator that take up gobs of room and only show you three lines of content. I say, make those designers work 80 hours a week on a 650 page document with 50 layers and 20 master pages on an iMac and see how they love that interface! Not all of us have the luxury of dual screens (pity the poor PC users who barely have that as an option).

Still, interface is only half the story. What designers really want isn't bells and whistles, but features that will save them time. If you aren't involved in a deadline-driven industry, you have no idea how critical 5 or 10 seconds can be. (This is one of my biggest pet peeves about Quark's interface. Things that should be simple [like changing a document's page size] are overly complicated and take far longer than appropriate.)

Does InDesign save us time? It's difficult to tell without using it, of course, but from the published feature lists, I'd say not much more than our existing tools.

What designers want is automation. We want automatic soft drop-shadows, the kind you normally must laborously create in Photoshop. We want sophisticated tables that provide unlimited custom formatting and table styles (so editing a style changes all tables of that style in a publication), and tables should allow inline editing and intelligently break across pages. We want automatic figure and table numbering and captioning. We want footnotes that automatically adjust when we reflow text. We want pictures that are anchored to specific lines of text, pictures that are smart and jump to preset sizes in our grids, or to align themselves to specific areas of our pages. We want graphical styles, page styles, and document styles.

We want an incredibly powerful find/replace function, similar to FreeHand's, where we can change all graphics, colors, fonts, trapping, styles, table, figures, folios, captions, headlines, etc. with one click. We don't just want a true grouping function that resizes everything inside it, but we want an intelligent grouping function, one that understands the relationship between the elements so when we resize an advertisement non-proportionally, it adjusts everything to fit the new size (PageMaker's "adjust layout" function attempts this, but it's pretty feeble).

We want print variables, where we can change an item throughout a document by editing the variable (useful for an issue number or date, for instance), or linking it to a database for printing personalized documents or documents with unique content. (Can you picture a personalized clothing catalog that redesigns itself depending on the nature of the intended recipient? Say, only showing certain style dresses for certain women, formal suits for business men, and casual clothes for people like me? With digital printing growing fast, variable data's the future.) In fact, that database might as well be built-in to the page layout program (since that's really what's in a publication anyway -- data).

Most of all, we want brainy formatting, where the program can know item prices fall into a standard format, the name of our company is always written in a certain font, or the beginning paragraph of a chapter always begins with the first three words in small caps. I want real sophistication. If all the articles in my magazine use a common format (say large intro photo, headline, centered 2 point rule, byline, and body copy), just importing an article should automatically format it appropriately.

I'm not talking wizards -- an ugly, hand-holding concept that repels every creative instinct in my body -- but simple design rules. In short, an intelligent page layout program, so that by specifying a few design parameters and styles, the document will create itself. Then we can spend more time designing and less time in production.

Today's tools, and sadly, InDesign, are not much different from pasting up waxed typesetting on galley sheets (except the text is easier to edit).

Such layout concepts would require radical rethinking on the part of companies like Adobe, but if they don't do it, someone else will. Personally, I do a hundred mundane tasks a day that could be automated. (And keep in mind that I use as much automation as I can via One Click, AppleScript, and a program's built-in scripting or plug-in capabilities.)

InDesign promises some powerful new scripting and plug-in capabilities, allowing third parties to redefine and add capabilities to the program. (Table editing is one feature third parties are expected to add.)

Unfortunately, scripting is not as user-friendly as I would like. I want scripting for the novice. After all, a rule-based system like I speak of above couldn't be done without some sort of rule-based language -- a script, if you will. However, instead of specifying control loops and variables, why not a visual language? The user could sketch an example style and the program could interpret that as rules. Ah, a drop cap beginning each article. Ah, a dominate photo on intro spreads.

Is such a concept so far-fetched? To me, it would be easier than say, speech recognition, and far more practical. In fact, if a professional designer set up the styles for your company, such a smart layout program could let just about anyone design professional, consistent publications. (It couldn't be any worse than now, when we have design-clueless office assistants doing company brochures in Microsoft Excel.) You'd even have the ability with one click on a choice of document style to create different versions of the same document, say a formal piece for big business clients, and a wild layout for surfing fans.

Adobe has done some good things with InDesign, but they apparently are putting a lot of eggs into the Plug-In basket, assuming features like I describe above could be added by third parties. I'm doubtful on that score as it seems you'd need access to the InDesign code at the very lowest levels, but I'd love to be proved wrong.

If not, perhaps there's a tiny new Quark or Aldus in a garage out there, readying the revolutionary program us designers crave and deserve.

Though Marc works for a commercial printshop, his thoughts are his own and don't necessarily represent those of anyone living or dead.

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July 05, 2009