The heart of a DTP product is typography, for which InDesign is second to none. There is fine control over drop capitals, kerning, tracking, justification and scaling. OpenType fonts offer advanced features like contextual alternative characters, which automatically inserts ligatures or other special glyphs according to their place within a word. The Paragraph composer optimises spacing and hyphenation for an entire paragraph, retrospectively re-formatting earlier lines as you type. A great feature is that imported graphics remain editable. For example, InDesign has its own excellent tools for drawing shapes and paths, so you can take in an Illustrator drawing and continue to work on it. The transparency options not only lets you control opacity but also offers special effects like drop shadows, feathering, and multiple blending modes such as soft or hard light. InDesign has complete support for professional printing standards, but Adobe also provides on cross-media choices, such as PDF, HTML and SVG, which is an emerging standard for Web graphics. There is also an option to import, export and edit XML, with exciting possibilities for repurposing content.

InDesign 2.0 is ideal for magazines, advertisements and brochures. For books or manuals, something like Adobe FrameMaker is a better choice. It is strong competition for the market-leading Quark XPress, and the fact that its system requirements are heavier is perhaps balanced by the fact InDesign is half the price of Quark. Convenience features like multiple undo and redo make InDesign a pleasure to use. Creativity in print has never been easier. --Tim Anderson

My only pet hate is that there is still not enough support from the print end... also long ducuments are a bit of a pain (especially if you add a few effects).

Version 3 will be something to watch out for if this is anything to go by...

If you are having problems installing the OS X upgrade, then take a visit to Adobe's web site as they have a new installer that works with your upgrade CD. The updates that take it 2.0.2 are essential.

Overall this is a great product & well worth learning!


InDesign wins!   February 11, 2003
I've been using Quark and InDesign and I must say Indesign is the winner! With all the support for the latest technology (e.g. Opentype) it is the professional layout programme. Blends in with all the other Adobe products. It also has basic drawing tools so that you can draw strait on your page rather than make a drawing in Illustrator or Freehand first.
I did several projects with it and all worked out very well. The only thing is that you need an up-to-date machine performance wise to run it on. Otherwise it will be too slow.


Indesign the best DTP no question   July 3, 2002
 27 out of 28 found this review helpful

Having worked in the print industry for a number of years I have had the opportunity to use all of the leading DTP packages extensively. Both Quark and Pagemaker are fine, respectable packages and do their job well, however Indesign is head and shoulders above both of them.

The levels of stability and accuracy are staggering,making anything else I have seen look very weak.

The new design tools such as transparency and table editor are amazing, applying drop shadows to any object, being able to import excel tables and edit them from within Indesign. Brilliant intergration with Illustrator and Photoshop and native output to PDF and built in Pre-flight- these are the things that save you hours in your working week.

Even if you are a die hard Quark fan, please try this package, it is the best DTP package without question .


If this would install without errors I'd give it 5 stars   April 18, 2002
 0 out of 1 found this review helpful

Overall I'd love to say I love this, but seeing as how the only way I'm going to get it running on Mac OS 9.22 is to spend hours on tech support phones - I can't.

If you need this to work straight out of the box, look at as many forums as possible or call tech support at Adobe.

This is a shame as the potential for this product is huge! 1/2 the price of it's main competitor & with a feature set to die for - shame the horse stays in the stable...

I'll add to this review when I can get it working!