Adobe InDesign 2.0 Pre Review

By Reagan Andrews 
September 2003

Adobe is the premier publisher of graphics editing and page layout software for both the PC and Mac platforms. InDesign 2.0 is a product that’s difficult to place in either niche since it combines magnificent text handling tools and basic drawing capabilities. It is essentially a very powerful, multipurpose publishing tool.

InDesign is really aimed at the publishing professional and definitely not for the casual or novice user who only wants to crank out neighborhood church bulletins or garage sale flyers. This latter group will be better served by one of the low end publishing programs such as PrintShop or Microsoft Publisher.

InDesign 2.0 is priced by Adobe at $699 for the full version and $149 for the upgrade version. Prices seen on the Web range from $300 to the full Adobe price for the full version.

Although I swore a number of years ago that I would never again attempt to review any program with this level of power and complexity, I find myself being forced to abandon my favorite page layout tool, Corel Ventura 4.2.  I simply need more contemporary software that supports more extensive graphics and word processor flexibility in publishing the North Texas PC News. I’ll miss the ease of monthly newsletter updating inherent to Ventura, but moving to Windows XP added to pressure to make the change.

Why not the latest version of Corel Ventura?

When Corel moved from Ventura 4.2 to Ventura 5, the user interface was significantly changed and I was unwilling to learn another at that time. I was able to get by with this decision until XP.

Corel Ventura is now at version 10 and even further removed from the simplicity I admired in 4.2. Also the .CHP files that Win XP detests remain as subsections of the Ventura .PUB documents.

Why InDesign?

I chose the Adobe product because of Adobe’s stability, prominence in the publishing arena and as a result of several reviews of InDesign in both professional and general media. The professional media reviews waxed ecstatic over InDesign’s transparency and layering features, which spurred my curiosity.

Perhaps, most important was font and text handling capabilities claimed for InDesign. One reviewer described them as "awesome," and from reading the manual coupled with some early playing, I would have to agree on that label. Since the newsletter is primarily text, this is an important feature to consider in making the decision. Yes, you can do most of this, such as adjusting color font sizing, etc., in other programs, but Adobe appears to have made this elegant and graceful.

Another factor in this decision is Adobe’s claim that the same document can be published in three major formats; PDF, HTML and XML which would allow a good printable version in the PDF format as well as a Web-friendly format for members who prefer to view the newsletter online.

Again, I regularly use Adobe PhotoShop and Acrobat and am familiar with the user interface, which is a significantly positive point.

Initial Impressions

The machine being used is powered by an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ CPU, has 1 GB of DRAM and features 30+ GB of 10,000 RPM of SCSI III drives. After double-clicking on the InDesign icon, only a few seconds pass until the InDesign screen appears.

I was very pleased with InDesign’s installation and setup, which proceeded to smoothly accomplish its task and, as is an Adobe characteristic, was quite parsimonious in terms of disk space used in the process: 78 MB. In contrast, A&L Express 6 uses 158 MB, but does include an extensive clipart library (probably not a fair comparison.) Space used to be important until the advent of the multi-gigabyte disks common now.

If I hadn’t been familiar with the Adobe products above, the home screen would have been intimidating. It’s very, very busy. It also demands a good-sized monitor. If I were using this in a rush production setting, I wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than a 21" monitor (or a 19" flat panel display.)

Comparing this to Corel Ventura 8 results in a "draw" since it’s equally busy and not terribly intuitive if you don’t use other Corel products on a regular basis. I guess "busy" is the price of power.

I haven’t used QuarkXPress since the 1990’s so I can’t add that to the comparison. Since I did not like it on the PC platform then, it really wasn’t a consideration here.

Adobe also made a decision to enhance InDesign’s long document capabilities with this release by adding Table and Book elements to the mix. I’ll probably become quite familiar with the table capabilities, but doubt I’ll be doing too much work with indexing and other book features.

Learning curve will be steep

Skimming the InDesign 2.0 user manual quickly told me I will be facing a steep learning curve in order to become even moderately proficient in using the program. The manual is well thought out and appears to be fairly comprehensive in its coverage of InDesign’s features, tools and operations.

Adobe was certainly free with additional PDF format guides to supplement the manual, including a PDF copy of the manual as a Help guide. After years of Microsoft’s skimpy documentation, I was really impressed.

A visit to the Adobe Web site was equally impressive, with even more operational tips and guides available to InDesign users. The Adobe Site was also much easier to navigate than some other Web sites I’ve visited recently looking for similar material.

A major problem in climbing the curve will be the universal lack of agreement on nomenclature between publishers. I’m going have to "forget" Ventura’s nomenclature, procedures and keyboard shortcuts and learn InDesign’s nomenclature and procedures instead.

I started this piece by calling it a "Pre Review," which it is. I plan, if I learn quickly enough, to do the October issue of the NTPCUG newsletter in InDesign. A second review of InDesign will follow detailing my experiences with the new software.

As a favor to those with ink jet printers and expensive ink cartridges, I’ll probably not make extensive use of InDesign’s transparency tools other than to illustrate the feature itself.

-- Reagan Andrews   

Reagan Andrews is a Managing Editor/Publisher of the North Texas PC Users News..
He may be contacted by e-mail: Click here to contact Reagan Andrews