>Adobe eventually came up with a project, codenamed K2, code-codenamed 'Quark Killer', now called Indesign. It's good. It has native support for Opentype fonts. Nobody uses it.

I do. I like it. Anyone else?

I wish the "soft creamy acid-cured cheese of central Europe made from whole milk" would go away already. Better yet, I hope it gets bought by Microsoft.

i use it, and have since version 1.5. i'm proud to say i can now barely run xpress.

Nobody uses it.

Ha! We do. All over the blessed place. InDesigncertainly isn't perfect, but it's amazingly better - in oh so many ways - than the alternative. That being said, I can't wait until Adobe finally stuffs full-metal OpenType support into the rest of its quiver.

In reponse to Allen's piece that no one uses InDesign, he's wrong. Quite a few people do. Including the three of us so far.

Adobe has been relentless in signing people up and its PDF platform is making it a no-brainer to do so. Especially at a corporate level.

In using InDesign, recently on some book work - I have found it incredibly furstrating as it simply doesn't do what I knew how to do in Quark. Creating run-on text boxes from a masterpage seems to be an impossibility and things like that seem to always get uncovered at the most inconvenient times.

InDesign has a lot, apparently, of hardcore Type stuff - which seemed to be lacking in Quark. But it does seem to a fat and heavy application - in needing lots of RAM etc. Which Quark was the opposite of. I do like little touches of being able to drag PDF's into object boxes and how it converts PSD artwork on the fly to appear in an InDesign document. The convergence between the apps is much appreciated.

For an interesting read on Adobe's contribution to the desktop publishing world - you can read their book - Inside the Publishing Revolution - The Adobe Story by Pamela Pfiffner of CreativePro.com.

indesign is so much better than quark in every way. but it's still a bit slow.

I've been using InDesign since its first buggy release. I much prefer it to Quark. Our entire office is now using InDesign, including our in-house print shop, and we've had mostly good experiences with it.

For us, one area where InDesign has been a blessing has been for the layout of academic posters, which often contain many complex tables and graphs.

I think Adobe is doing a fantastic job so far with the program. It still has a few issues, but for a version 2 release, it already seems quite mature.

Get ready for this: I use PageMaker. As do the four other designers in my department, one of whom judged the AIGA book show a couple of years ago so it's not like we're not a bunch of philistines. My main problem with InDesign is that the document navigation functions on the level of the page rather than the spread. I better suck it up though, since we're switching before long.

(Incidentally, I use Quark for book covers, and we do not typeset in house which might change the equation drastically).

PageMaker... that's funny... seriously, what program do you use?

My dad still uses PageMaker. It's actually not a bad piece of software, I think it just lacks the control and mainly the acceptance of printers that Quark has.

I was a big supporter of InDesign 1.0, but when I got here (Norman D) we have a big client who relies a 100% on hundreds of Quark files, we just can not change to InDesign, not after the thousands of hours we've put into getting these files working and delivering the way we (client and us) expect to. God knows I would love to.

I hate Quark. I just can't let it go.

My wife hates for me this, but I actually design my layouts in Illustrator and once I get it looking all purty I then pass it on to Quark. I know it's double the work, but it works for me. At least I'm not using PageMaker like all those philistines : )

> we have a big client who relies a 100% on hundreds of Quark files, we just can not change to InDesign

InDesign opens Quark files and maintains everything. You can then easily save as ID or PDF. If that helps, cause like you, before ID I would layout book/page stuff in Illustrator page by page, cause I hate the antiquated incapabilities of Quark!

Armin: Illustrator? I might be a philistine, but you are a masochist. ; )

I am pretty much just using PageMaker for comps and not production work. Anything that goes to the printer goes in Quark (at least from my desk—some of my colleagues happily use PM for production, with perfect results).

If InDesign weren't so sluggish I'd be doing production work in that instead.

>but it's still a bit slow.

>If InDesign weren't so sluggish

What machine are you guys running InDesign on? I'm curious to know because

it runs fast on mine. (10.2, Dual 1GHZ PowerMac, 1GIG RAM)

i use quark and iD and pretty much find them interchangeable. minus the pdf part of iD, which is much better. support of native psd and ai files also helps.

i do nearly everything in illustrator, only venturing out to set extended type.

i run almost the same as kiran: 10.2, dual 867, 1gig ram

i guess i haven't noticed it beign slow either...

but that's probably because we're slumming in some pretty suped up comps.

Why hasn't Adobe incorporated pages into Illustrator yet? FreeHand has had this feature for a while now, right?

>Why hasn't Adobe incorporated pages into Illustrator yet? FreeHand has had this feature for a while now, right?

Yup, freehand has had that feature for a long time. I guess if Adobe added multiple pages to Illustrator there would be no reason in buying InDesign. I know, I know... PDF support. Well PDF, SchmiDF, they could easily add that to illustrator too and just call it a day.

My office workstation is a bit of a contraption: a blue minitower housing a G4 550 processor, 500 mb ram, and running 9.1. On my home machine, which is not as nice as Kirin's or Brook's but is still a dual G4 running 10.2, it runs fine. Buggy though: what's with the special character glitch where it turns things pink when you convert text to small caps or ornaments? Or does that just happen to me? I suppose if I committed to the software I would be able to solve these problems myself.... *grump*

> it runs fast on mine. (10.2,

> Dual 1GHZ PowerMac, 1GIG RAM)

Quit bragging. ;o)

> Why hasn't Adobe incorporated pages into

> Illustrator yet?

Because then you wouldn't buy InDesign. (oh wait...Armin just said that...)

> FreeHand has had this feature for a

> while now, right?

It has. I typically use FH for things under 10 pages or so. Sadly, MM hasn't been taking care of Freehand that well lately. FH10 was an unusable piece of software and FHMX, the 'paid bug fix' to FH10 still has several major bugs in it.

>what's with the special character glitch where it turns things pink when you convert text to small caps or ornaments?

The InDesign manual (pg. 136) says:

"By default, text formatted with missing fonts appears in pink highlighting."

Freehand anyone? Multi-page layouts, vector tools... am I crazy, I love it, but it can be painful at times.

Thanks Kiran (spelled correctly this time) but the fonts are there and work in every other application. It's a mystery!

(Sorry, don't mean to turn this into an InDesign troubleshooting thread.)

>What machine are you guys running InDesign on? I'm curious to know because it runs fast on mine. >

it's gets slower proportional to the amount of graphics you add to the document and of course the number of pages. but i have to admit since "high quality display" is available for both .ai and .psd (and most other files) i simply can not go back, and i keep it active all the time. just like i could never work with greeking turned on in quark. i can live with slow as long as it looks great and works perfect.

So Darrel, what bugs does FHMX have? I'm running 10 now and I'd like to upgrade because FH10 sucks!. I don't really want to trade one set of aggravations for another. Maybe I should just go back to 8.

Speaking of Quark:

Some highlights of version 6.0

And via Veer - via Textism, a translation of Quark's press realease for version 6.0

Kyle:

Jump into Macromedia's Freehand newsgroup.

The main bugs are font problems on OSX that seem isolated to Freehand...not any other app.

I was encountering some hanging puncutation problems and various path filter problems, but they seem to exist in FH10 as well.

MX is definitely better than 10...ESPECIALLY on Windows (FH10 on Windows 2K crashed every two hours or so for me). Most people are just upset that FH10 never had a bug release and instead they expect people to just pay for an MX upgrade.

A great translation of Quark's latest PR:

http://daringfireball.net/2003/04/translation.html

Earth to Darrel...

Already posted it...

helloooooo...

Boy, you are on my trail today : )

actually, just bookmark the entire daring fireball site. i've been reading it since i found the initial link.

'doh!

Sorry, Armin ;o)

No problemo. I just thought it was kind of funny it happend twice. In the same thread.

fhmx = great. i've had no problems using tt, ps2 or ot fonts w/ it. converting to curves - everything's beautiful - even MMs. type control is good, fast, although i liked the old fh interface a little more, or at least was more comfortable w/ it - i use no other macromedia products.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame follows up on Dean Allen's riff inspired by the original spin of Quark PR. Still following me? Yeah, whatever... read on.

The Sticky Business of Page Layout

Indesign is the king, quark is the queen, I'Design brings everything into it quark cannot bring I'Design into it.

A few glitches to note ie preflight is not always right

> I actually design my layouts in Illustrator and once I get it looking all purty I then pass it on to Quark.

I used to do the same thing before Indesign.

I've been using nothing else since the summer. I use a lot of illustrations so I love the ability to drag .ai files straight into ID. Here's to it becoming the industry standard so the art directors will stop looking at me funny when I tell them in interviews that I prefer it. Sometimes change is the hardest thing.