Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign is a DTP application produced by Adobe Systems. Launched as a direct competitor to QuarkXPress, it has had a tough uphill struggle to woo users away from Quark's offering, but in 2002 it outsold QuarkXPress, largely because Quark was slow to release a native version of XPress for Mac OS X. Also, Adobe can bundle InDesign with its other design tools, such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop—tools that XPress buyers will probably still need anyway—and undercut Quark's price. However, InDesign remains a distant second to XPress in the high-end DTP market, despite the fact that InDesign is more powerful than XPress in most scenarios.
InDesign can export documents in Adobe's Portable Document Format, and offers multi-lingual support that Quark users must buy a much more expensive "Passport" version to get. InDesign is the first major DTP application to support Unicode for text processing, and the advanced typography of OpenType fonts. Its advanced transparency features also set it apart. Finally, it features tight integration and user interface similarities with Illustrator and Photoshop programs.
InDesign is positioned as a higher-end alternative to Adobe's own PageMaker. The program is primarily used to design short documents (i.e. not books), posters and other print media, but it also has some multimedia/web/pdf features. Longer documents like books are usually still designed with FrameMaker.
Comparisons with QuarkXPress can be found here:
http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/20604.html
http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/003/software/indesign/indesign-1.html
http://www.gxo.com/ARCHIVESPDF/Software/62410QuarkXPress6.pdfsoftware.
http://www.macworld.com/2002/05/features/dtp/
Versions
- InDesign 1.0 shipped August 16, 2000.
- InDesign 1.5 shipped in early 2001.
- InDesign 2.0 shipped in January, 2002 (just days before QuarkXPress 5).
- InDesign CS (3.0) shipped in October, 2003
