The Page Layout Turf Wars

Catalogers looking to improve their workflow and productivity have much to celebrate these days.

With the introduction of Adobe® InDesign® 2.0 and the much-awaited upgrade from Quark—QuarkXpress® 5.0—you now have significant improvements in page layout production applications.

Both InDesign 2.0 and QuarkXpress 5.0 added upgrades that will save catalogers time and money. Both programs support tables, export to PDF, offer image and content libraries, produce pages for the Web, and support XML. Your design staffers will love the layers for versioning and the automatic table of contents creation and indexing.

But after those similarities, it’s evident that Adobe’s InDesign, with its modular new code, breaks out ahead of QuarkXpress, whose code is beginning to show its age.

Adobe Systems is the second largest software company (behind Microsoft), and catalogers have relied for years on other Adobe products, such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. Adobe has played to its strength with the introduction of InDesign.

As amazing as it may have seemed just two years ago, the new InDesign is giving QuarkXpress a significant run for its money. Below are a few of the many reasons why.

Productivity Enhancements

A major productivity enhancement is interoperability—the ability to integrate seamlessly with other design tools. InDesign allows the placement of other Adobe native layered files such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat.

There’s no longer the need to save native files to a format that Quark can support. You even can update your Photoshop and Illustrator files from within the InDesign workspace—saving hours of production time and improving accuracy.

Transparencies and Drop Shadows

Transparencies are created and edited right within InDesign. A soft angora sweater with fuzzy edges now can be placed flawlessly into a colored background or even over another image without a clipping path! This feature alone will save hundreds of hours yearly and is enough to make converts out of current QuarkXpress users. When you tack on the ability to add drop shadows, and create feathering and gradient fills, design is back where it belongs—in the page layout tool.

Typographic Refinements

Another important innovation is in typographic control. QuarkXpress has a single-line composition engine and automatically adjusts the kerning and letter spacing on a line-per-line basis.

With InDesign’s multi-line composer, the best possible linebreaks and hyphenations now are possible across multiple lines and paragraphs. Consider also the optical margin alignment that supports hanging punctuation, and you can see why InDesign will delight any typography purist.

InDesign also supports Open-Type, a new type format created by both Microsoft and Adobe that is cross-platform and allows catalogers to automatically adjust individual characters such as swashes and ligatures.

Assorted Goodies

There are many other little goodies in InDesign that will make catalogers happy.

Following are some of my personal favorites:
• unlimited undos and redos;
• same screen zoom and full page views;
• files automatically saved when your computer crashes;
• ability to create a PDF of a complete catalog—not just single pages;
• an automatic layout adjustment feature, which adjusts all the components of a page when the page size is changed (think multi-purposing);
• page sizes from a single square pica (1⁄16 of an inch) to an 18-foot square;
• eyedropper formatting—select the format you like and apply it elsewhere with the eyedropper (type styles and formats);
• ability to import Microsoft Word and Excel tables with automatic multi-page flows;
• hierarchical master pages—modifications ripple down to associated master pages;
• image views in high resolution;
• multi-language support at no additional cost;
• complete color management consistent with Photoshop and Illustrator;
• scripting in AppleScript and Visual Basic;
• placement of native Illustrator and Photoshop files as well as TIF, PDF, BMP, DCS 2.0, EPS, GIF, JPG, PICT, WMF, PNG, PCS and Scitex CT;
• export options to PDF (without Acrobat Distiller), EPS, HTML or Postcript;
• zoom views from 5 percent to 4,000 percent with crisp type resolution;
• built-in, sophisticated preflight and packaging functions; and
• native support of Mac OS X and Windows XP.

To Print or the Web

Will printers support the new upgrades? There seems to be little reason for concern with either QuarkXpress 5.0 or with InDesign 2.0. Adobe commands the market’s Postcript systems so InDesign integrates tightly with standard prepress applications such as Artwork Systems ArtPro, ScenicSoft Preps and TrapWise, as well as Agfa, Creo-Scitex, Heidelberg, Harlequin, Hewlett-Packard and Xerox systems.

For the Web, Quark has sent a powerful message on just how easily content creators can use QuarkXpress 5.0 to build Web pages. Web page creation options are excellent in Quark. But you have to decide to create a Web page at the beginning when you open a new file. InDesign lets you export to HTML while saving the original page for print. It also supports WebDav (Distributed Authoring and Versioning) server protocol for online collaborative proofing.

Is it Time to Change?

Any upgrade means an investment of time and money, and some catalogers may decide to wait before making up their minds. For small shops, the benefits outweigh the investment, so designers and small ad agencies have quickly embraced InDesign. Adobe is betting on everyone eventually switching to InDesign and is spending millions of dollars in free training and marketing.

Fossil, which produces 50 catalogs annually, switched to InDesign. With more than 50 printers worldwide, Fossil executives say everyone is thrilled with the high degree of success in printing from InDesign files.

Aquent, the world’s largest design talent agency sees InDesign as the future of publishing and is training its designers accordingly. Rochester Institute of Technology decided to standardize InDesign. Professor Frank Romano, who has written many books on QuarkXpress, says it “represents a whole new way of thinking about page layout and design.”

And finally, here at e-Diner Design & Marketing, we’ve switched to InDesign. Our designers are excited about the creative flexibility, and we’ve already seen productivity improvements.

Miriam O. Frawley is president of e-Diner Design & Marketing, a catalog advertising company. She can be reached via e-mail at miriam@e-dinerdesign.com; through the company Web site at www.e-dinerdesign.com; or by calling (845) 928-6075.