InDesign
has become Roger's page layout program of choice, although using QuarkXpress
is still
more familiar and second nature to him. He made the switch because Quark's
performance in OS X is less stable and InDesign has been available
in OS X since early 2002.
A
major
interface
advantage when using InDesign over Quark is the implementation of their
Palettes. In standard Quark, you need to go into dialogue boxes to
make changes like alignment, links, paragraph formatting, character
formatting, non printing pages, text wrap, etc. Roger used QX-Tools
to add a few of these features that come standard in InDesign. Furthermore,
the Palettes work like they do in Illustrator & Photoshop. You
can nest Palettes together, which allows the opening & closing
of the Palettes to open the whole nest which really helps when working
on small screens like in TiBook. InDesign takes advantage of Quartz
in OS X that makes the document
look better.
Roger showed the preview mode available in InDesign which shows how
the document will print without guides at a click on the tool bar.
Another feature in InDesign is the ability to switch from Typical Display
to High Quality Display that shows EPS documents as they will print
instead of a proxy view in QuarkXpress. Roger impressively demonstrated
InDesign's ability to save unsaved changes in documents if InDesign
crashes by force quitting InDesign with 4 documents that had unsaved
changes and then re launching InDesign. When InDesign opened, the 4
documents opened exactly as they were before the crash.
Other
features that Roger likes in InDesign that he showed were:
multiple undo's, changing all the text or paragraph attributes of
multiple stories by using the Selection Tool, the Paragraph Composer,
easily redefining style
sheets, using the eyedropper to copy attributes between objects or text formatting,
accepting native Photoshop & Illustrator files including layers and adjustment
layers, built in transparency. Drag & Drop of text & graphics including
automatic tables from Excel documents, blending modes like Photoshop and
Illustrator built in effects such as Drop Shadows, Corner Effects and Feathering.
InDesign exports beautiful Acrobat files and has a good deal of control over
the output with the click of a button. For users who are afraid of being
able to output their InDesign files, any service bureau is likely to output
Acrobat PDF files. QuarkXpress 6 for OS X will be coming out soon, but Roger
doubts it will have many of
the
great
enhancements
of
Adobe
InDesign or that he will go back to using Quark as his page layout program
of choice.
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