Developer(s) | Adobe Systems |
---|---|
Initial release | August 31, 1999 |
Stable release | CC 2019 (14.0.2) / April 2019; 2 months ago |
Written in | C++[1] |
Operating system | Windows, macOS |
Available in | 24 languages[2] |
English, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Zulu | |
Type | Desktop publishing |
License | Trialware |
Website | adobe.com/products/indesign/ |
Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and typesetting software application produced. InDesign CS versions updated with the 3.1 April 2005 update can read InDesign CS2-saved files exported to the.inx format. The InDesign.
Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and typesetting software application produced by Adobe Systems. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, books and ebooks. InDesign can also publish content suitable for tablet devices in conjunction with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Graphic designers and production artists are the principal users, creating and laying out periodical publications, posters, and print media. It also supports export to EPUB and SWF formats to create e-books and digital publications, including digital magazines, and content suitable for consumption on tablet computers. In addition, InDesign supports XML, style sheets, and other coding markup, making it suitable for exporting tagged text content for use in other digital and online formats. The Adobe InCopy word processor uses the same formatting engine as InDesign.
- 1History
History[edit]
InDesign is the successor to Adobe PageMaker, which was acquired by Adobe with the purchase of Aldus in late 1994. (Freehand, a competitor to Adobe Illustrator and also made by Aldus, was sold to Altsys, the maker of Fontographer.) By 1998 PageMaker had lost almost the entire professional market to the comparatively feature-richQuarkXPress 3.3, released in 1992, and 4.0, released in 1996. Quark stated its intention to buy out Adobe[3] and to divest the combined company of PageMaker to avoid anti-trust issues.
Adobe rebuffed the offer and instead continued to work on a new page layout application. The project had been started by Aldus and was code-named 'Shuksan'. It was later code-named 'K2' and was released as InDesign 1.0 in 1999.
InDesign was the first Mac OS X-native desktop publishing (DTP) software. In version 3 (InDesign CS) it received a boost in distribution by being bundled with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat in the Creative Suite.
InDesign exports documents in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and has multilingual support. It was the first DTP application to support Unicode for text processing, advanced typography with OpenTypefonts, advanced transparency features, layout styles, optical margin alignment, and cross-platform scripting using JavaScript.
Later versions of the software introduced new file formats. To support the new features, especially typographic, introduced with InDesign CS, both the program and its document format are not backward-compatible. Instead, InDesign CS2 introduced the INX (.inx) format, an XML-based document representation, to allow backwards compatibility with future versions. InDesign CS versions updated with the 3.1 April 2005 update can read InDesign CS2-saved files exported to the .inx format. The InDesign Interchange format does not support versions earlier than InDesign CS. With InDesign CS4, Adobe replaced INX with InDesign Markup Language (IDML), another XML-based document representation.[4]
Adobe developed InDesign CS3 (and Creative Suite 3) as universal binary software compatible with native Intel and PowerPCMacs in 2007, two years after the announced 2005 schedule, inconveniencing early adopters of Intel-based Macs. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen had announced that 'Adobe will be first with a complete line of universal applications'.[5]The CS2 Mac version had code tightly integrated to the PPC architecture, and not natively compatible with the Intel processors in Apple's new machines, so porting the products to another platform was more difficult than had been anticipated. Adobe developed the CS3 application integrating Macromedia products (2005), rather than recompiling CS2 and simultaneously developing CS3.
InDesign and Leopard[edit]
InDesign CS3 initially had a serious compatibility issue with Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), as Adobe stated: 'InDesign CS3 may unexpectedly quit when using the Place, Save, Save As or Export commands using either the OS or Adobe dialog boxes. Unfortunately, there are no workarounds for these known issues.'[6] Apple fixed this with their OS X 10.5.4 update.[7]
Server version[edit]
Adobe InDesign Server
In October 2005, Adobe released InDesign Server CS2, a modified version of InDesign (without a user interface) for Windows and Macintosh server platforms. It does not provide any editing client; rather, it is for use by developers in creating client–server solutions with the InDesign plug-in technology.[8] In March 2007 Adobe officially announced Adobe InDesign CS3 Server as part of the Adobe InDesign family.
File format[edit]
Filename extension | .indd |
---|---|
Internet media type | application/x-indesign |
Open format? | no |
Website | https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/kb/supported-file-formats-indesign-cs5.html |
The MIME type is not official
Versions[edit]
InDesign CS5 icon
- InDesign 1.0 (codenamed Shuksan, then K2): August 31, 1999;
- InDesign 1.0J (codenamed Hotaka): Japanese support;
- InDesign 1.5 (codenamed Sherpa): April 2001;
- InDesign 2.0 (codenamed Annapurna): January 2002 (just days before QuarkXPress 5). First version to support Mac OS X, native transparencies and drop shadows;
- InDesign CS (codenamed Dragontail) and InDesign CS Page Maker Edition (3.0): October 2003;
- InDesign CS2 (4.0) (codenamed Firedrake): May 2005;
- InDesign Server (codenamed Bishop): October 2005;
- InDesign CS3 (5.0) (codenamed Cobalt): April 2007. First version to support Intel-based Macs, regular expression and table styles;
- InDesign CS3 Server (codenamed Xenon): May 2007;
- InDesign CS4 (6.0) (codenamed Basil): October 2008;
- InDesign CS4 Server (codenamed Thyme);
- InDesign CS5 (7.0) (codenamed Rocket): April 2010;
- InDesign CS6 (8.0) (codenamed Athos): April 23, 2012;
- InDesign CC (9.2) (codenamed Citius): January 15, 2014;
- InDesign CC 2014 (10) (codenamed Sirius): June 18, 2014;
- InDesign CC 2014.1 (10.1): October 6, 2014;
- InDesign CC 2014.2 (10.2): February 11, 2015;
- InDesign CC 2015 (11.0): June 15, 2015;
- InDesign CC 2015.1 (11.1): August 11, 2015;
- InDesign CC 2015.2 (11.2): November 30, 2015;
- InDesign CC 2015.4 (11.4): June 20, 2016;
- InDesign CC 2017 (12.0): November 2, 2016;
- InDesign CC 2017.1 (12.1): April 14, 2017;
- InDesign CC 2018 (13.0): October 18, 2017;
- InDesign CC 2018 (13.0.1): November 2017;
- InDesign CC 2018.1 (13.1): March 2018.
- InDesign CC 2018.2 (13.2): March 2018.
- InDesign CC 2019 (14.0.1): November 2018.
- InDesign CC 2019 (14.0.2): April 2019.
Newer versions can as a rule open files created by older versions, but the reverse is not true. Current versions can export the InDesign file as an IDML file (InDesign Markup Language), which can be opened by InDesign versions from CS4 upwards; older versions from CS4 down can export to an INX file (InDesign Interchange format).[9][10]
Internationalization and localization[edit]
InDesign Middle Eastern editions come with special settings for laying out Arabic or Hebrew text. They feature:
- Text settings: Special settings for laying out Arabic or Hebrew text, such as:
- Ability to use Arabic, Persian or Hindi digits;
- Use kashidas for letter spacing and full justification;
- Ligature option;
- Adjust the position of diacritics, such as vowels of the Arabic script;
- Justify text in three possible ways: Standard, Arabic, Naskh[further explanation needed];
- Option to insert special characters, including Geresh, Gershayim, Maqaf for Hebrew and Kashida for Arabic texts;
- Apply standard, Arabic or Hebrew styles for page, paragraph and footnote numbering.
- Bi-directional text flow: The notion of right-to-left behavior applies to several objects: Story, paragraph, character and table. It allows mixing right-to-left and left-to-right words, paragraphs and stories in a document. It is possible to change the direction of neutral characters (e.g. / or ?) according to the user's keyboard language.[11]
- Table of contents: Provides a set of table of contents titles, one for each supported language. This table is sorted according to the chosen language. InDesign CS4 Middle Eastern versions allows users to choose the language of the index title and cross-references.
- Indices: Allows creating of a simple keyword index or a somewhat more detailed index of the information in the text using embedded indexing codes. Unlike more sophisticated programs, InDesign is incapable of inserting character style information as part of an index entry (e.g., when indexing book, journal or movie titles). Indices are limited to four levels (top level and three sub-levels). Like tables of contents, indices can be sorted according to the selected language.
- Importing and exporting: Can import QuarkXPress files up to version 4.1 (1999), even using Arabic XT, Arabic Phonyx or Hebrew XPressWay fonts, retaining the layout and content. Includes 50 import/export filters, including a Microsoft Word 97-98-2000 import filter and a plain text import filter. Exports IDML files which can be read by QuarkXPress 2017.
- Reverse layout: Include a reverse layout feature to reverse the layout of a document, when converting a left-to-right document to a right-to-left one or vice versa.
- Complex script rendering: InDesign supports Unicode character encoding, with Middle East editions supporting complex text layout for Arabic and Hebrew types of complex script. The underlying Arabic and Hebrew support is present in the Western editions of InDesign CS4, CS5, CS5.5 and CS6, but the user interface is not exposed, so it is difficult to access.
User groups[edit]
InDesign has spawned 86 user groups in 36 countries with a total membership of over 51,000.[12]
See also[edit]
- Scribus, a free, cross-platform and non-proprietary alternative to Adobe InDesign
- Tasmeem, an Arabic enhancement
References[edit]
- ^Lextrait, Vincent (January 2010). 'The Programming Languages Beacon, v10.0'. Retrieved March 14, 2010.
- ^'language versions | Adobe InDesign CS5'. Adobe.com. Retrieved December 4, 2010.
- ^Ann Marsh (May 31, 1999). 'Pride goeth before destruction'. Forbes. Archived from the original on August 28, 2017. Retrieved February 5, 2013.
- ^'InDesign developer documentation'. Adobe Developer Connection. Adobe Systems. Retrieved November 24, 2013.
- ^San Francisco - Live Coverage of Steve Jobs Keynote 1:00PM EDT, June 6th, 2005, WWDC 2005 - Live Coverage of Keynote, The Mac Observer
- ^'Adobe InDesign CS3 5.0.2 Update Read Me'(PDF). Retrieved December 4, 2010.
- ^Leopard 10.5.4 Fixes InDesign Nav Services Glitches By: Anne-Marinewse, June 30, 2008, InDesignSecrets
- ^'Adobe InDesign Server CS2 Frequently Asked Questions'(PDF). Adobe.com. Archived from the original(PDF) on June 4, 2007. Retrieved April 29, 2007.
- ^'How do I save my file using InDesign CS6 so that it can be opened with CS5?'. forums.adobe.com. January 2013. Retrieved January 28, 2015.
- ^'Can You Save/Open CS6 Files on CS5, CS4 or CS3 – and Vice Versa?'. prodesigntools.com. February 20, 2013. Retrieved January 28, 2015.
- ^'Arabic and Hebrew features in InDesign'. Adobe InDesign User Guide. Retrieved August 7, 2018.
- ^'User Group Chapters'. indesignusergroup.com. Retrieved February 25, 2011.
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Adobe InDesign. |
Wikiversity has learning resources about Adobe InDesign |
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Adobe_InDesign&oldid=900379207'
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$20.99
- ProsSuperbly balanced interface. Easy, smart automatic global page adjustment. Contextual information at your fingertips. Huge selection of downloadable fonts.
- ConsRequires subscription. PDF comments integration needs polish.
- Bottom LineInDesign maintains its relevance, giving the commercial creative of 2019 an edge in satisfying ever more-demanding client requests. Despite minor quibbles, InDesign is a must-have for any professional designer.
The major message at this year's Adobe Max Conference was that in 2019, everyone can—and should—be more creative. And why not? Powerful new features in the CC family can nurture anyone's creativity. InDesign CC 2019, Adobe's acclaimed page composition program fits right in with this strategy, advancing the capability of design software, especially when it comes to the user experience. Adobe is reimagining InDesign to accelerate workflows, liberate creativity, and encourage exploration—all while motivating us to embrace immersive new media. Big changes in Adobe fonts, automatic layout adjustment, and a smart new Properties panel are just a few of the specific updates that make InDesign feel refreshed and attuned to the current design zeitgeist.
- $499.00
- $19.99
- $9.99
- $99.99
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Pricing and Getting Started
InDesign is available only by subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, either as a single app, for $20.99 per month, or as part of the entire design suite, for $52.99 per month. Adobe's CC suite includes every arrow in Adobe's professional design software quiver, including Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and more. For comparison, Microsoft Publisher (Windows-only) comes with Office 365 subscriptions starting at $6.99 per month; QuarkXPress costs $849 (or $399 as a competitive upgrade); VivaDesigner starts at $139 for a permanent license with no subscription; and Xara Designer Pro X costs $299 as a one-shot or $5.95 per month as a subscription.
You can install InDesign on up to two computers simultaneously. Mac and Windows versions interoperate, with Windows 7 SP1 and macOS 10.13 or later supported. Both platforms require at least 4GB RAM (with 16GB recommended) and a 32-bit video card.
Even though InDesign is widely considered the ace advanced page-design tool, there are other notable page-layout applications in the arena. For PC, Mac OS, and Linux, VivaDesigner from Germany offers an integrated word processor and a browser-based platform option. QuarkXPress presents many similar capabilities, the differentiator being that it does not force you into a subscription. On the PC you have Corel Draw 2019 and Xara Designer Pro X, which touts WYSIWYG web design and an onboard image editor.
The Path to InDesign
In the dawn of desktop publishing, there was Aldus PageMaker (InDesign's predecessor after Adobe purchased Aldus in 1994) and Quark Xpress, which offered more robust tools catering to a growing professional user base. Adobe resisted Quark's acquisition attempts and forged through a PageMaker rewrite, and in 1999, introduced InDesign—the first Mac OS-native desktop publishing software.
Since then, designers and production artists have been using it to create a spectrum of print design deliverables—books, brochures, newspapers, and magazines—and more recently to produce ebooks, interactive PDFs, and other content for digital destinations.
InDesign's forte is assembling, designing, laying out, typesetting, and preflighting complex multipage layouts. The program's project-specific workspaces, such as Interactive PDF, Advanced, or Digital Publishing, simplify your workflow as you begin.
Choose one of InDesign's preset workspaces, or make and save one of your own.
A good example of a project for which InDesign is eminently suited would be a user manual that requires a foreword with Arabic page numerals, chapter divisions with Roman letter page numbering, a variety of diagrams, and a comprehensive index. After the design phase, in advance of printing or publishing, a comprehensive preflight panel helps troubleshoot the file, making certain there are no missing fonts, unlinked or low-resolution images, color inconsistencies, overset text, or other issues.
Typography Triumphs With Adobe Fonts
A pioneer of digital type for the Macintosh (having created PostScript), Adobe was early to the font scene with the 1988 launch of its must-have, tabloid-sized quarterly magazine and font catalog, Font&Function, wherein this question was posed: 'Can a designer who loves good type, good design, and good taste find happiness on a desktop?' Today it's easy to answer in the affirmative. Back then, designers would need to call the distributor to find the nearest dealer, phone in the order to the dealer, wait eagerly by the mailbox for their font to arrive on a set of floppy disks, before finally answering that, yes, fonts worked on the desktop.
Three decades later, working with type has just become more exciting, with the newly named Adobe Fonts (formerly TypeKit). Within InDesign, subscribers now have unlimited access to the entire Adobe font library in both screen and downloadable desktop formats. Added to that are the updated Character Panel's real-time visual font browsing (seeing your highlighted text displayed in the actual font) and improved search. This means that when you engage the pull-down font menu, you see the fonts installed on your computer—as well as, if you like, the more than 14,000 fonts in the Adobe library. Now we can sort and filter font attributes, classifications, starred favorites, or recently used categories to find—or discover—just what we have in mind.
There is even more InDesign font fun with newly compatible SVG OpenType Color Fonts. These new full-color glyphs may seem a bit gimmicky to the professional designer and illustrator, but there is no denying that people are creating some interesting and beautiful illustrative type.
A note of caution: Take care to make sure you are using OpenType SVG (vector) fonts rather than bitmap color fonts, because in the latter each glyph is a raster image (as opposed to regular fonts being vector-based), so file sizes can get large. Also, InDesign warns users of font limitations with these fonts. Outlining and exporting to PDF aren't yet possible, for example.
Flex Your Layout Muscles
Have you ever had a client inform you—on round four or five—that they need to change the page size or orientation of your document? Of course you have! With the latest InDesign, it doesn't have to be the time-consuming grunt work that it used to be, thanks to the new Adjust Layout feature.
So, what's the difference between InDesign's new Adjust Layout and the Liquid Layout and Alternate Layouts tools introduced in CS6? Liquid Layout facilitates the process when you are tasked with designing alternative layouts to handle multiple page sizes (such as for a range of devices) by allowing you to create and apply specific rules (centering, scaling, and guide- and object-based) about the mechanics of how those changes adapt to various page situations. This can be semi- or fully automatic.
While Alternate Layouts can be used in conjunction with Liquid Layout, the former feature is primarily geared to digital or print publication projects that require different layouts within the document. Both systems reduce the manual work required to lay out every page in a document a second (or third, or fourth) time.
Adjust Layouts is the new utensil in this drawer of adaptive and responsive page-design tools, and you reach for it when you need to amend page properties (such as size, bleeds, and margins) of a document—after text and images are already in place.
You no longer need to live through yesterday's madness of page-by-page manual adjustment via the Document Setup or Margins and Columns pulldown. Today, you have in-app options presented just by accessing that Document Setup menu and clicking Adjust Layout. There you can change global page, margin, and bleed measurements—and even the font size. You can also find another Adjust Layout option in the Margins and Columns dialog box to further assist with your reconfiguration requirements.
Of course, the discriminating designer can expect to make a few trials and perform tweaks, but the new Adjust Layout feature can save you time and agita the next time you need to adjust the page or spread layout of an entire document.
Adjust Layout semi-automates the process of reformatting a publication in a different size or orientation.
You'll find another keen new feature in the Frame Options panel. Clicking on the Content-Aware Fit option after you have placed an image into an existing frame tells InDesign to guess the important part of the picture and resize the photo accordingly.
After placing an image into a frame, click the Content-Aware Fit option to have InDesign guess what's important to show. The orange arrow shows the new content-aware option in the Framing dialog panel.
Pleasing Properties Panel
The additional convenience of InDesign's new Properties Panel decidedly supports Adobe's mission to accelerate users' workflows and improve the app's ease of use. This new context-smart panel gathers and displays your most-often-used controls, along with relevant settings for your current task. For the object you have selected (shape, text block, or linked image), the panel shows two sections of information. First, there are the Transformation and Appearance controls and Settings (similar to the Appearance panel in sister app, Illustrator). Next there are the Dynamic controls, which appear based on the context of what you are doing at the time of selection.
When you have nothing selected, the Properties Panel displays page-specific information concerning guides, units, and related preferences.
Three representative states of the new Properties Panel: (A) with nothing selected, (B) with a text frame selected, and (C) with a rectangle path selected.
New PDF Options
Adobe invented the Portable Document Format (PDF) in 1993, and with its free Adobe Acrobat Reader, transformed ease of communication between applications and platforms. Now with the ability to import PDF edits and comments directly into the program, working with PDFs becomes even more convenient in InDesign. There's no more back-and-forth between apps or split screens. Furthermore, you can track and manage the subsequent feedback and comments of any marked-up PDF right from InDesign.
You now have a variety of options for exporting still and interactive PDFs.
My experience trying out this new feature was a bit clunky, however. The copying and pasting process is finicky. Also, when a comment is just a sticky note rather than a Strike or Insert directive, clicking on the comment icon takes you to the page in question, but does not indicate where on the page the actual comment was made.
There are a few important requirements to note: First, the PDF being commented upon must be made from the current version of InDesign; and second, the PDF comments can only be imported into the original InDesign file from which the PDF was made.
Since its introduction in CS5, InDesign's dynamic PDF form-making capability continues to bloom. In addition to specifying fields such as text blocks, radio buttons, and check boxes, InDesign CC 2019 now supports form fields with customizable typeface control when you're exporting an InDesign file to an interactive PDF form—without the need to tweak the form in Acrobat.
Blazing New Trails
Though undisputed as the trailblazer of page and publication design, Adobe's distinguished and long-time champ InDesign doesn't rest on past and current achievements. Adobe is advancing the cutting edge of how we work and what we create. This, built on an already strong base of tools makes InDesign our top recommendation in the page-design category and a PCMag Editors' Choice.
Adobe InDesign CC
Bottom Line: InDesign maintains its relevance, giving the commercial creative of 2019 an edge in satisfying ever more-demanding client requests. Despite minor quibbles, InDesign is a must-have for any professional designer.
- $9.99
- $99.99
- $14.99
- $99.99