InDesign Perspectives

by Marc Zeedar

As many know, my initial perspective on InDesign was one of disappointment. Out of the box, ID doesn't come with many of the niceties I'm accustomed to and it doesn't revolutionize desktop publishing. But after seeing a demonstration of the program at Adobe's InDesign seminar in San Francisco on July 13 and playing with a Beta, I'm happy to say that ID's a good start.

The plug-in architecture of ID is more than a marketing gimmick or mimic of Quark XPress. It's actually the only revolutionary part of ID. I've heard ID described by Adobe as "a Publishing Operating System," and that strikes me as an apt description. The program is more modular than any software I know -- even Photoshop. The core program is only 2 MB in size and 90% of the functionality of the program is added via plug-ins.

Plug-ins can not only communicate with and modify just about every aspect of the program, they can interact with each other! In other words, if you add a table-making plug-in, another plug-in could get information about and interact with the table object. This also means that plug-ins are completely scriptable, just like any other aspect of InDesign.

While there's currently no "Plug-in Manager," you can enable or disable plug-ins by moving them in or out of the plug-in folder, just like you do with Photoshop. (Presumably someone could write a plug-in for managing plug-ins.)

Adobe has expanded their Adobe Online feature to allow automatic updates of plug-ins: you set your preferences for frequency of updating and Adobe Online will log in to the Internet, download any new plug-ins and install them for you! This means that even though the initial version of InDesign will have a few bugs, they will be corrected in days or weeks, not months.

Plug-ins were key to the InDesign seminar; just about any feature mentioned was either being added via a plug-in by Adobe or a third party. At minimum, the missing feature _could_ be added via a plug-in, if a developer would do it. For instance, I mentioned the lack of a Story Editor like we find in PageMaker, and the Adobe rep told me a company is working on one. There are apparently over 100 third-party plug-ins for InDesign in development, which is amazing for a product that hasn't shipped!

As far as the program itself goes, the most impressive features center around typography. InDesign features a new "multi-line" compositing engine. Both Quark XPress and PageMaker feature single-line composing engines, which means that when the program is flowing type it only looks at the current line when deciding to hyphenate and track text. That's why so much desktop-set type has rivers of white and ugly white gaps between words. With InDesign's multi-line composing, ID checks every line with the 6 above and below, examining 36,000 possible ways to reflow the type and selecting the best option. This slows text flow slightly, but you have complete control over whether ID uses single- or multi-line composing (you can even set it as part of a style).

Along with multi-line composing, ID features optical kerning. Select some text and choose "optical kerning" and ID will tighten the type based on character shapes (i.e. putting an "i" under the wing of a "V") just like you would if you had the time. A variation of this feature, called "optical alignment," gives you hanging punctuation. Even more impressive, the Adobe rep showed how ID would hang punctuation within the negative space of a drop cap!

InDesign boasts most of the standard features graphic designers have come to expect from page layout programs: layers, master pages, gradient fills, powerful find/replace features (similar in capability to PageMaker's, which are better than Quark's), etc. Nothing quite revolutionary, but decently done. There are some nice touches, too. For instance, the master page system supports "children" -- create a master named "Cover A," duplicate it and name the copy "Cover B." Move an item on Cover A and the same item moves on Cover B (since B is a child of A)!

ID handles pages similar to Quark -- each page has its own pasteboard. The good news is that ID's pasteboard is larger and unlike Quark, ID didn't mind when I moved an item so it was falling off the pasteboard (it just clipped the view of the item).

Visually, ID greatly resembles Adobe Illustrator, with lots of palettes. The Adobe rep I saw seemed rather amused at all the fuss over so many palettes. "What's the big deal?" he said. "Illustrator and Photoshop have zillions of palettes, too. Just hide and show them by pressing tab. Or buy two monitors."

To my great relief, the "Transform" palette (which lets you move items) includes a position proxy, just like PageMaker's control palette. I tested this by selecting a box, choosing the center proxy, and typing "+.25" in the width field and pressing return. The box stayed centered and grew by an eigth of an inch on both sides. That's a function I do all the time (for adding bleeds) and it's great to see ID has picked it up from PageMaker.

In terms of usability, while I only got to use ID for less than ten minutes, I found the interface clean and fairly self-explanatory. There were some gotchas. For instance, the document I opened was set to picas, which I don't like. I first looked to the lower left corner of the window to see if there was a handy measurement popup menu like in FreeHand. There was not, though the percentage of zoom field did popup with lots of zoom sizes. Next I looked at the document setup command, which in PageMaker contains the measurement settings. Nothing. Finally I went to preferences. None of the choices looked particularly helpful, but I chose "General" and there was the measurement choice. (With ID's AppleEvent support though, it should be no more than a five minute job to create a OneClick popup button to choose between measurement systems.)

International and multi-lingual users will love one InDesign feature: it ships with the dictionaries for about 20 languages. You can assign selected text, stories, or a style to be a particular language and ID will use that dictionary for spell-checking and hyphenation. This is cool if you've got foreign language phrases in your text, or produce bi-lingual documents. It's also going to kill Quark, which currently requires the purchase of separate versions of XPress for each language (at U.S. $2000 each). The Adobe guy told me he spoke with a Swedish ad agency that is ecstatic with ID since their clients use several Scandanavian and European languages and the company currently is forced to spend about $10K for each "copy" of XPress (five languages at $2000 each times number of designers).

InDesign has also upped the ante on Guides. ID supports guides like Quark --- dragging a guide to the page creates a Page guide; dragging to the pasteboard creates a Spread guide (the guide crosses all pages in the spread). Better yet, ID gives you several methods of working with guides. There's a Guide Manager dialog which creates guides in a grid shape for you automatically, and the Step-and-Repeat command also works on guides! You can also set a view threshold for guides, so certain guides are only visible when you're at 100% and others only at 400%.

I wasn't overwhelmed by ID's export capabilities. It exports in HTML (we didn't see this, but it uses cascading stylesheets for more accurate layouts than possible with PageMaker's HTML Export command), PDF (without using Distiller!), and "prepress" (which is like PageMaker's .sep PostScript file). But I didn't see graphic or text export, Illustrator support (I guess it could open a PDF), etc.

While ID has all the import capabilities you'd expect, and some nicities like Illustrator items being editable, there are limitations. ID will open Quark XPress 3.3 and 4.0 files, and get this -- only PageMaker 6.5 files. So those who thought they could put off upgrading to 6.5 and go straight from 6.0 to ID are going to have to rethink their plan.

Some notable InDesign features:

 
• Unlimited undo and redo.
• You can reprogram all of the keyboard shortcuts (and paragraph and character styles can be assigned shortcuts) to whatever you want.
• Zoom from 5% to 4000%. (The Adobe guy seemed really impressed by this. I was like, yeah, it's nice, but it still doesn't match FreeHand's 25,600%.)
• You can control stroke and fill of type without converting it to outlines.
• You can convert text to outlines... and then edit the resulting paths.
• You can group text and several objects, rotate and even sheer them, and the text is still editable.
• You can fill text with a graphic or gradient fill.
• ID documents can have up to 9,999 pages, though there's currently no support for a "book" feature, a la PageMaker. (This could be added with a plug-in.) You apparently can divide a document into "sections" which can have separate page numbering sequences. This feature was not demonstrated, however.
• Indexing and Table-of-Contents generation are being added via plug-ins. Sounds like these are third-party items and will cost extra.
• Kerning is accurate to within 1,000,000th of a point. Yes, all those zeros are supposed to be there.
• You can import native Photoshop (PSD) files and layers are automatically flattened when the file is printed.
• If you import a file with a clipping path, you can edit the clipping path right within ID.
• When you import files, you have the option of specifying the resolution of the preview image.
• Placed graphics can be viewed at full resolution, preview resolution, or grayed out, just like PageMaker. I don't know if this works like Quark where selecting a grayed out item shows it in preview mode or like PM where it's still a gray box.
• You can preview items before you import them.
• You can place PDF files directly. ID has a built-in RIP, so the quality of the on-screen PDF preview is extremely high.
• You cannot edit PDFs right now, but this will change with an update.
• Currently, trapping is limited to object-level (overprint stroke) and in-RIP (PostScript Level 3), but this will change.
• Support for transparency is coming.

The program crashed once turning the demonstration, but this allowed the ID team to show us a really cool ID feature: automatic document recovery. InDesign memorizes the steps it takes to recreate your document, and if you crash (or the power goes out) while you have an ID document open, relaunching ID automatically recreates the document. You only lose the last action you did (and since that might have caused the crash, that's a good thing). It worked great in the demo.

I wish I'd had time to actually place some text and do a little layout so I could compare ID's frames with Quark's and PageMaker's, but I didn't. ID's are supposed to be better than either's (allowing nesting and other features), but they didn't even show this in the demonstrations so I'm not sure how usable it is.

All-in-all, I came away impressed. ID looks good, the interface didn't bother me as much as I thought, and Adobe seems really keen on the fact that via plug-ins any annoyance or limitation can be overcome.

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