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InDesign 2.0 is all about creative page layout. A high-end desktop publishing product, it is aimed squarely at professional designers who need maximum flexibility alongside strong document management and support for industry standards.

Eye-catching features such as transparency and blending are combined with more mundane--but important--abilities such as table of contents and index generation, to make this a more complete and rounded product than earlier versions. It also benefits from integration with other Adobe products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, and Acrobat. Adobe maintains a consistent user interface across the range, easing the learning process.

The heart of a desktop publishing product is typography, for which InDesign is second to none. The software offers fine control over drop capitals, kerning, tracking, justification, and scaling. OpenType fonts offer advanced features such as contextual alternative characters, which automatically insert ligatures or other special glyphs according to their place within a word. The paragraph composer optimizes spacing and hyphenation for an entire paragraph, retrospectively reformatting earlier lines as you type.

A great feature of InDesign is that imported graphics remain editable. For example, InDesign has its own excellent tools for drawing shapes and paths, so you can import an Illustrator drawing and continue to work on it. The transparency options not only let you control opacity, but also offer special effects such as drop shadows, feathering, and multiple blending modes such as soft or hard light. InDesign has complete support for professional printing standards, but Adobe also delivers on cross-media choices, such as PDF, HTML, and SVG, which is an emerging standard for Web graphics. There is also an option to import, export, and edit XML, with exciting possibilities for repurposing content.

InDesign 2.0 is ideal for magazines, advertisements, and brochures. For books or manuals, something like Adobe FrameMaker is a better choice. InDesign offers strong competition to the market-leading Quark XPress, and the fact that its system requirements are heavier is perhaps balanced by the fact that InDesign is half the price of Quark. Convenience features such as multiple undo and redo make InDesign a pleasure to use. Creativity in print has never been easier. --Tim Anderson

User Reviews about Adobe InDesign 2.0 [Old Version]

I took Introduction to Graphic Design during my 3rd year of undergrad. Listening to lectures with step by step instructions on how to use the program left me feeling impatient, because I was able to learn how to carry out tasks by exploring on my own!

I spent hours on my projects, not because it was hard, but because it was so much fun. Thanks to this amazing program, I got an A in the class (they don't give out A+ anymore =P)!

Now that I've graduated and don't have access to the college's excellent computer lab, I feel like theres a hole in my life. No lie! Yup. I'll definitely be pinching pennies until I can afford it for my own PC! -- Beginners Heaven

InDesign doesn't need any help from me, but the negative review below was a little annoying. The writer doesn't seem to have tried very hard to learn the program. A) ID does support bold and italic for fonts that have the style -- that's what "character styles" are for. Those who prefer "fake fonts" shouldn't be using a high-end typesetting program. B) Image resizing is done by percentages (context menu in Windows, not sure about Mac). It takes a bit of math, but it allows you to size images _precisely_. C) If you insist on using EPS output, the "Package" command sends all the linked files to CD, but PDF is a better option most of the time. D) Who leaves all the palettes turned on? Merge or hide them and save your setup. -- Don't people read the manual any more?

I admit, I'm one of those terrible, hated Mac users.... the type that adopted only AFTER OS X came into existence because OS 9 could not compete with what was available for PC....

Still, when I switched (and I'll never go back), a lot of products weren't yet available for X, including InDesign. Since my primary occupation is copy-editing, that meant I had to have PageMaker 7.0 for OS9....

I hated it. At the end of my last PM project, I downloaded the evaluation version of InDesign 2.0 and promptly fell in love.

If Pagemaker seems kludgy, slow, buggy.... switch. Eat ramen and Mac and Cheese for a month if that's what it takes, but switch. You won't regret it if you have to do any type of editing or layout! -- The Pain is GONE for Pagemaker users!

Previous negative reviews mentioned linked text files--I ran into this once, asked on Adobe Forums how to fix it, and someone provided me almost instantly with a little script that "embeds" all my text files instantly with one click. Another way to avoid it is to copy and paste your text rather than placing it.

Resizing images? Easy! You can resize the frame and fit to the frame, resize the image and fit the frame to the image, you can resize both simulatenously, you can even create a star-shaped frame and place an image into it! Your frame can have a feathered or rounded edge if you want, etc. I've never had a problem resizing images quickly and easily.

Type styles: The workarounds for this are much more printer friendly. Want a bold? Make a character style that "strokes" the outline of the font with a .1 or .25 point stroke. You can just eyedropper it in place where you need it or create a paragraph or character style to place it. Need a faux italic? Same thing...just "slant" the text in the character box.

Of course the character and paragraph styles are separate! They'd be too big otherwise! Most of the time I'm just using paragraph styles--I don't need to see the character styles. If I need to do both, I just undock the character style palette and then both are visible at once. I can even dock them together "stacked" without difficulty so they're not floating separate but both are visible.

Too many palettes? Close the ones you don't use. Minimize the ones you infrequently use. Note that the upcoming version, InDesign Creative Suite will allow for even more docking options, so you can choose how it looks.

Optical Kerning? Works great on my printer, I don't know what's wrong with yours. When I look at similar documents pre and post InDesign, I'm blown away by how much BETTER the ID documents always look.

Underline text? What's wrong with ctrl alt U? You can also set a character style for underlining, and eyedropper from one place to the next.

Gimmicky CD covers? We do a trade journal, myriad ads, newsletters, marketing in InDesign and they've never looked better or gone together faster.

I've used PageMaker. This program is to PageMaker what PageMaker was to the older versions of Publisher. It is so much faster, easier and more intuitive. No more repetitive stress injuries for me from doing the same key combos over and over and over again. I use about 1/8th the number of clicks I needed before to accomplish the same task. There are tasks I never would have bothered trying in PageMaker. And those who've used both Quark and InDesign by and large say ID has far more features and is much better to use. -- Incredible functionality

Aptly called the Quark-Killer, InDesign rocked my world the first time I used it (version 1.5). There was almost no learning curve for me, because of the familiar Adobe interface. My only complaint at that time was that it was a bit sluggish (this was improved greatly with version 2.0).

I would like to address some negative features I have seen reviewed with InDesign.

1. Type styles. In a Postscript workflow, menu styling of fonts (such as used in Quark and Pagemaker) is an abomination. If there is no italic variant available for a font, then the last thing you want is for your DTP software to "fake it". It produces horrible results in a professional workflow, such as font defaulting. The fact that InDesign only lets you use italic or bold if the font is designed to do so is a blessing, not a curse, and will hopefully bring to an end years of agony for pre-press professionals.

2. Optical kerning. This (again) is designed to function properly in a postscript printing environment. If you are proofing with a non-postscript printer, it would probably be better to create/export a PDF file from your InDesign document, and try printing from that. Keep in mind that InDesign is professional software and is designed with a professional (postscript) workflow in mind.

3. Image resizing. Images can easily be resized within a text frame by using the white selection arrow (similar in function to Illustrator). If you click a placed image in an object frame, it will select the stuff INSIDE the box. You may then apply any sort of transformation or scaling that is necessary. The black selector arrow is for selecting page objects and containers.

4. Collecting for output. This is FAR more advanced than anything Quark (or Pagemaker) has been able to do. This neatly collects ALL linked files/images and fonts and puts them in an organized folder. Quark often collects incorrect fonts (if it gets them at all) and occasionally misses links.

I work at a university that specializes in the professional arts (such as graphic and multimedia design). Usually when I demonstrate to a student (or teacher) the features and ease-of-use of InDesign, they usually pick it up very quickly and eagerly. After they get used to using it, most complain about having to use Quark thereafter.

Overall, fantastic software for graphics professionals. -- InDesign is the wave of the future