I felt that it was not much of an improvement over PageMaker. I still retain some of those conclusions, but I believe my prejudices were and are influenced by my familiarity with PageMaker.

PageMaker was originally the cash-cow product of the Aldus Corporation which was purchased a few years ago by Adobe. The first thing Adobe did was to change some keyboard commands to make them more in line with their cash-cow product PhotoShop. This action made sense to them as they were PhotoShop oriented. The changes, however, made it more awkward for PageMaker users. I assume that many PageMaker users objected (as I did) and further changes seemed to have been throttled. As a result, the later upgrades of PageMaker contained few changes and, frankly, were not worth the price of the upgrade. I suspect that they wanted everyone to switch to their newer, more upscale product InDesign.

InDesign is somewhat of a merger of PageMaker and PhotoShop. Users of PhotoShop will feel rather comfortable using it as the look and feel leans toward PhotoShop. PageMaker users, I believe, are not as comfortable.

The boxes which you can display on the desktop in InDesign offer great flexibility but take up too much visual space. PageMaker had an add-on program produced by Extensis called PageTools which allowed small buttons to be placed up and down the sides, top and bottom, floating - whatever you wanted them. It offered an amazing amount of short-cut commands including many that Adobe had not thought of! Once you had the buttons in place, you could produce output extremely rapidly. The buttons were small, out of the way, and were where you wanted them. InDesign offers no such option.

I suggest in future upgrades of InDesign that they explore reducing the floating boxes to buttons. I believe they could easily do this as their Tools "box" consists of buttons and can be placed anywhere on the screen.

The best of both worlds would be to make boxes or buttons optional at the discretion of the user. Perhaps some buttons could trigger a temporary box which could be easily closed; or even offer fly-out options.

One reason I believe this would be better is because the present color box makes it extremely difficult to choose the color you desire because the box is too small. If it would be reduced to a button, you could click on it and a large easily closable box could appear on screen thus making it easier to choose the exact color you want. The same action could apply to other complicated commands.

If these changes were implemented, it would reduce screen clutter and, I believe, make the program easier to use.

With all the above criticism you might think that I do not like InDesign. To the contrary, I believe it is an excellent program, it just needs some tweaking.

One notable improvement over PageMaker is the ability to import images with transparent backgrounds. This, obviously, is a feature of PhotoShop.

Finally, InDesign is a better, more flexible program than PageMaker and deserves the serious attention of layout and publishing houses. However, it does have a somewhat high learning curve. Also, since the Extensis program PageTools is no longer available for PageMaker, it cripples its productivity by making it harder to use.

The big drawback to InDesign is that it is an expensive product. PageMaker is less expensive. If your needs of publishing do not include exact placement and critical detail, you would be better off with PageMaker. If, however, you want greater control and a higher quality of production, InDesign must be your choice.

The more you use a product the more you discover what it can do. I will report in future editions on any new upgrades or future discoveries.

Adobe InDesign 2.0
Adobe Systems Incorporated
$699 ($149 upgrade),
$299 upgrade from PageMaker
Requirements: (at least)
Intel Pentium II
Microsoft Windows 98SE
128 MB RAM, 145 MB harddrive space
CD-ROM drive
1024x768x256 colors
Limited use demo available
Adobe product box shot and screenshot reprinted with permission from Adobe Systems Inc.