Howlsthunder:
#adobe_indesign My review is primarily from the point of view of a switcher, going from Quark XPress to InDesign. If you are a graphic designer, you should know why you need high-end layout software like InDesign, so this review is based on the assumption that you already know what you are doing. ;)
I went to school for graphic design and at the time InDesign did not exist. Quark XPress was pretty much industry standard so that's what we learned and that's what I used as a working professional up until 2009.
Most of the reasons I like InDesign are due to its NOT being XPress, though it took two years of using ID on the side to decide to switched, since I was so comfortable with QXP. XPress crashed a lot. XPress was cumbersome with making PDFs. XPress was not cross-application friendly, seeming to downright HATE anything made by Illustrator. Still, it was hotkey-friendly and intuitive and hardly took up any room on the desktop and it worked fine. When it worked (version 6 and variants were very buggy in our office).
After the umpteenth time of having to call up Quark to have them grant us access to our own copy of Quark (something you had to do anytime you reinstalled it), we switched over to InDesign and haven't looked back since.
The first thing I love about InDesign is its compatibility with other Adobe products and file formats. You can place just about anything into an InDesign file, for better or worse - even PSD and AI files. You can also copy and paste vectors directly from Illustrator and they will still be editable in InDesign, though I'd only do this with simple vectors. And, because it is Adobe, creating PDFs (and interactive ones, too) is a snap and way more flexible than the PDF options in XPress.
InDesign handles transparencies much better and even has a transparency gradient tool (though who knows, perhaps XPress finally has one now, too). Effects like drop shadows are simple to apply and are handled similarly as in Photoshop.
Tables are WAY easier to build and manage in InDesign. Holy cow, I can't even tell you.
The alignment features are MUCH more detailed, intuitive, and user-friendly as well.
ID Prints much better and more accurate proofs to our in-house desk jets than QXP ever did.
There are a lot of other little things, too, that are nitty gritty but make some layout processes smoother. Like setting tabs, or multiple justifications within a single sentence (that was SUCH a pain in QXP - very buggy). And ID just does things you'd think would be a basic function than QXP doesn't have or just takes a few versions to implement.
And I won't even GO into the difficulties of dealing with Quark over the phone. As nebulous as the worldwide call centers are for Adobe, at least you don't have to call them once or twice a year to keep your software activated. Sheesh.
Overall, ID has been a lot more stable than QXP and hasn't given us any problems. It has taken me awhile to re-learn how to do everything (ID does all the same stuff as QXP, just with totally different menus, hotkeys, etc) but I'm finding it to be an overall positive experience.
Apr 14, 10
