There has been a lot of talk about K2 the ‘Quark killer’, now officially known as InDesign. I went to one of Adobe’s presentations the other day and I must say the whole concept does look quite impressive. What impressed me most was that things I’ve been talking about in my columns over the last few months seem to have manifested. The obvious one is the creation of a new program and the abandoning the now ancient and bloated PageMaker, which has been relegated to the corporate Windows’ world—where they probably think they are using a cutting-edge design tool. XPress is in the transitory stage between versions 4 and 5, and it was at this stage that PageMaker started to fail. I hope that Quark have delayed the release of the Beta of XPress 5 to have a bit of a rethink and not fall into the same trap as its rival; an outdated program that was being enhanced by adding new features just to keep up rather than starting from scratch. Quark did it with version 3 of XPress and captured the market. Is Adobe about to do the same?
 
InDesign has almost everything I sent on my wish list to Quark. Seamless integration with PDFs (well it is Adobe’s technology), the ability to drag and drop images from other graphics programs, the ability to import native Photoshop files, small modular program with specialist features coming as third party plug-ins, low cost (for introductory period at least), improved output handling (again Adobe invented PostScript), plus a host of typographic niceties and enhancements including foreign language hyphenation (without having to buy a separate program).
Adobe have done their homework well, even allowing XPress files to be imported and exported and the option of allowing it to simulate the XPress environment with familiar keyboard shortcuts, as in Macromedia FreeHand. Will I be moving over to InDesign? Not in the first wave. XPress has a monopoly in the design world and that’s my bread and butter. I made the mistake of buying Letraset’s DesignStudio way back after being frustrated with XPress 2 and PageMaker 3. But as soon as XPress 3 came I was left with a program that had almost no support at repro, despite a lot of innovative features.
The other factor dissuading me is Adobe’s interface. 
Although the concept is commendable and for those who
use Illustrator and Photoshop daily it will be a boon but
I am not a big fan. I am FreeHand user and find
Illustrator completely unintuitive (but that’s another
debate for another time). Photoshop, we have no choice.
Quark killed off XPosure, a program that could have
done to Photoshop what Adobe want to do to XPress. It had
features that have only just appeared in Photoshop
(like the History palette) and some that have not, yet.
InDesign is certainly full of promise and features, and Adobe is taking a very realistic attitude in its approach to conquering the market. In fact if it does dominate it will be because Quark lost the battle, not because Adobe won.
My advice to XPress users - wait for XPress 5 before making a decision. Quark may surprise us all and listen to its users [maybe, just maybe].
