March 1999, Vol. 10, No. 3

Dread in Denver

Adobe’s InDesign easily challenges Quark XPress page layout pinnacle

It was always known as "K2" -- a reference to the second-highest peak in Asia’s Himalaya mountain range. Only in recent weeks has the "real" name been revealed: Adobe Systems Inc. will be selling a new page layout product called InDesign starting some time this summer.

As with many secret project code names, "K2" was telling: the K2 mountain (also known as Mount Godwin Austen) is 28,251 feet from sea level and, as such, towers over the Mile High City -- Denver, home of Quark Inc.

So the engineers and marketers at San Jose’s Adobe always saw InDesign as dominating XPress. They have put forth a product that surpasses XPress on a number of levels:

Using object-oriented programming techniques, InDesign’s "kernel" program weighs in at only 1.6 megabytes. Features will be added through plug-in technologies, which provide the program with a great deal of potential customization as well as flexibility that is not inherent in XPress.

This new flexibility comes with modular engines for composition and dictionaries. Though beyond the scope of a typical user to do, these components can be substituted.

This would allow an integrator to use its own composition routines and hyphenation dictionaries to ensure that hyphenation and justification is 100 percent accurate between a front-end word processor and the back-end page layout program. Lack of this flexibility has caused virtually all the development problems of systems that are based on Quark XPress and Microsoft Word.

If you're without that specific need, InDesign uses one of the most sophisticated composition engines ever invented -- the TeX system developed by Stanford mathematics professor Donald Knuth. The H&J of InDesign uses multi-line algorithms and therefore creates better typography than XPress. Further, InDesign supports four levels of kerning: manual, range, pair and optical.

File import and export (including printing) are streamlined in InDesign. With its understanding of the formats of Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat (PDF), Adobe has made it possible to import those files into InDesign and allow them to be edited directly.

Much like Illustrator (in fact, think of InDesign as a marriage between a page layout program and Illustrator), it has Bezier drawing tools, gradient fills and strokes. The user interface from Adobe’s other desktop publishing packages is the same as used by InDesign.

Perhaps best of all, InDesign will ship with a plug-in that opens Quark XPress pages (said to be "99 percent accurate") as well as customizable keyboard shortcuts that include an XPress template. An XPress user should be able to use InDesign and be productive almost immediately.

Don't expect to be able to pass XPress and InDesign pages back and forth, but do expect to be able to make an easy conversion from XPress to InDesign.

With a raft of newspaper industry suppliers supporting InDesign (including Baseview Products Inc., Digital Technology International, Managing Editor Inc. and System Integrators Inc.) as well as a planned "competitive upgrade" (if you own XPress, you can buy InDesign for $299), I am anticipating that InDesign will quickly gain a strong foothold in the newspaper industry.

When climbing a peak, getting a foothold is the first step.

We have a great issue inside, with stories from Senior Editor Pete Wetmore (he visits a CText pagination installation), Correspondent Steven E. Brier (he asks, Whatever became of computer-assisted reporting?) and Correspondent L. Carol Christopher (she takes a look at desktop computer tools that lead to better journalism).

Lastly, but certainly not least, we have a contribution from Jay Small (he surveys newspaper web sites to see how they handle customer service). After leaving Indianapolis Newspapers Inc., where most recently he was general manager of the on-line operation, Small became a consultant with VIA International of Minneapolis.

At the same time, we persuaded him to become a correspondent here at The Cole Group. Watch for Small’s trenchant views of technology, journalism and publishing.

-- David M. Cole

Hellbox

Dread in Denver

Adobe’s InDesign easily challenges Quark XPress page layout pinnacle

From THE COLE PAPERS, March 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.