Adobe InDesign

Desktop publishing is the process of editing and layout of printed material intended for publication, such as books, magazines, brochures, and the like using a personal computer.

Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing (DTP) application produced by Adobe Systems.

Launched as a direct competitor to QuarkXPress, it initially had difficulty in wooing users away from Quark's offering, but in 2002 it outsold QuarkXPress, largely because Quark was slow to release a native version of XPress for Mac OS X.

Start of Desktop Publishing

Desktop publishing started in 1985, with the conjunction of Aldus Pagemaker (later acquired by Adobe), the Apple Macintosh, and the $7000 Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to use Adobe Systems' PostScript page description language, including its scalable fonts in Type 1 format.

Desktop publishing software, such as QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign, is software specifically designed for such tasks. Such programs do not generally replace word processors and graphics applications, but are used to aggregate content created in these programs: text, raster graphics (such as images edited with Adobe Photoshop) and vector graphics (such as drawings/illustrations made with Adobe Illustrator).

he phrase desktop publishing is attributed to Paul Brainerd, the founder of Aldus Corporation, as a marketing term that referred to the use of a computer on top of a desk for publishing and also alluded the desktop metaphor that Apple used to mimic a real desktop.

Adobe InDesign

Adobe can bundle InDesign with its other design tools, such as Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop—tools that XPress buyers probably need as well—and undercut Quark's price.

However, InDesign remains a distant second to XPress in the high-end DTP market, despite the fact that InDesign is more powerful than XPress in most scenarios.

InDesign can export documents in Adobe's Portable Document Format and offers multilingual support that Quark users can get only by purchasing a much more expensive "Passport" version.

InDesign is the first major DTP application to support Unicode for text processing and the advanced typography of OpenType fonts.

Its advanced transparency features also set it apart. Finally, it features tight integration and user interface similarities with Illustrator and Photoshop programs.

InDesign is positioned as a higher-end alternative to Adobe's own PageMaker. The program is primarily used to design short documents (that is, not books) or articles in periodical publications, posters, and other print media, but it also has some web/PDF features. Longer documents such as books are usually still designed with FrameMaker.

New versions of the software introduced new file formats. Adobe upset its user base by not allowing to downsave to older versions of InDesign.

Apple Macintosh & PageMaker

The introduction of the Apple Macintosh and PageMaker allowed synchronous typographical editing using the graphical user interface, this system was commonly referred to as What You See is What You Get, WYSIWYG.

The Apple Macintosh, with historically superior graphics capabilities (particularly in the areas of typography and colour management), and a simple GUI, is highly popular in this application domain and remains one of Apple's core markets.

The Atari TT030 was widely used for DTP with Calamus application. Calamus has its own technology called Softripping for WYSIWYG which uses the same routine for output to monitor as well as high density print devices.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Desktop Publishing.

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