Adobe InDesign is a modern professional layout program with a variety of typographic characteristics and an advanced prepress system.
For whom?
Adobe InDesign empowers layout and design users with unique tools that combine reliability and functionality with absolute creative freedom. This combination is the hallmark of all Adobe products. With InDesign functions you can create and print page layouts faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Bit of story
After capturing a significant share of the raster and vector graphics market, in 1998 Adobe decided to expand its expansion into the professional full-color printing market. InDesign, which in the bowels of the company’s PR department was given the formidable name «killer of QuarkXPress», was supposed to crush its competitor, according to the company’s management.
Advantages of Adobe InDesign
The program is fully integrated with Illustrator and Photoshop, providing a unified design environment that won’t interrupt your creative process when moving from one program to another. Accordingly, since the information in the alpha channel is preserved when importing PSD files, image masking and control of text flow around the graphics are available.
Another plus is reading PDF documents. To facilitate the transition to InDesign, it includes support for publications collected in QuarkXPress and PageMaker. The program— the only one of the layout packages — in the standard delivery allows the publication to be scaled not proportionally, but separately horizontally and vertically (which is necessary for flexographic printing).
A big plus in InDesign is its extensive support for custom scripts (AppleScript or Microsoft Visual Basic). Moreover, Adobe offers documentation for writing scripts for free, unlike Quark.
Another difference from the competition is that when you import EPS and AI files that do not contain embedded preview images, InDesign creates them on the fly.
New tools for generating PDF files will prove useful when preparing electronic publications, as documents in this format are readable on a wide variety of platforms. Tagged PDF files can be viewed on small-screen devices such as personal electronic secretaries. Inline tags provide paragraph attributes, so text is output in the proper order.
In addition, the package allows you to generate standard PDF files for publishing to the Web.
A lot of tools for working with text, graphics, the ability to manage each page, templates and styles, convenience, multitasking, control panels familiar to Adobe — all this allows you to create a variety of layouts: from advertising modules and business cards to full-fledged magazines and newspapers.
Moreover: many designers began to use this program to create a website design!