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Adobe Unveils InDesign Publishing Program

PageMaker positioned for lower-end page-design market.

By Tom Spring, PCWorld   

At the Seybold Publishing Conference here this week, the desktop publishing giant also announced a revamped, "consumer-friendly" version of its desktop publishing program PageMaker.

InDesign is scheduled to ship in June at a price of $699.

Conference attendees were dazzled by InDesign's bells and whistles during a keynote address and product demonstration by Adobe CEO John Warnock and President Charles Geschke. But success teeters on convincing people like Rochester, New York, graphic designer Elizabeth Hornak.

Convincing the Masses

"InDesign is very impressive," Hornak says. "But I've been a die-hard Quark user for ten years. I won't switch."

Adobe hopes to wean users like Hornak off of Quark with InDesign's advanced features and tight integration with Photoshop and Illustrator, market-leading products from Adobe.

"We blow Quark out of the water," says Geoff Fitch, an Adobe product specialist.

Getting more specific, Fitch points to InDesign's advanced typography options and seamless operation with other Adobe products. InDesign uses a modular code base, so developers can tailor the program to customer needs. The core program is just 1.5MB in size, and all program functions are preformed through plug-ins.

Integration with Adobe's other graphic-design tools means InDesign can handle images created in Photoshop or Illustrator without complicated file conversions. And InDesign's user interface is identical to that of Photoshop and Illustrator.

To lure Quark users, InDesign accepts a set of QuarkXPress keyboard shortcuts. In addition, the program can open QuarkXPress and Adobe PageMaker files directly.

"InDesign fills a big hole for us," Fitch says. "Now we can aggressively go after the same market as Quark."

"These guys have got the next industry-leading program," says Simon Shendelman, president of Commercial Graphics, a design firm based in Westborough, Massachusetts. "It's got everything you could want."

Meanwhile, at the Quark booth, staffers offered passersby "YK2?" buttons--a reference to InDesign's widely known code name, K2.

"The battle hasn't even begun," says Shawn White, Quark's technical product manager. "It's far too early to be picking winners." He says he welcomes Adobe's challenge, and adds that until now, QuarkXPress didn't have any competition.

PageMaker Plus

Rather than update PageMaker to compete with Quark, Adobe decided to knock $71 off the price and reposition PageMaker for midsize businesses. PageMaker 6.5+ is scheduled to ship March 15 at a price of $499 ($99 for upgrades).

Added user-friendly features include 4700 stock illustrations in Adobe Illustrator format. The package also includes 300 photos, 315 design templates, and a palette for browsing and searching templates and image files (in the Windows edition only).

For ease of use, Adobe added a Microsoft Office-style icon-based toolbar to PageMaker, with shortcuts to commonly used features. PageMaker also includes a Microsoft Publisher and Photoshop file-conversion utility.

PageMaker no longer competes with QuarkXPress, says Richard Brown, Adobe product manager. Programs like Corel's Ventura 8 are the competition now, he says.

To that, Corel representative Susan Gauthier replies, "Corel isn't worried. The only [one] who should be sweating it is Quark."

Adobe also promoted a new version of GoLive, a Web authoring tool it acquired earlier this year from CyberStudios, and Acrobat 4.0.