Adobe Ships InDesign

Adobe is shipping InDesign, its next-generation design software that replaces the aging PageMaker as the company’s flagship page layout program. Developed from the ground up as a modern competitor to QuarkXPress, InDesign’s modular architecture allows third-party developers to add functionality to the core application. For design and prepress users, InDesign includes several advanced layout and typographical features, such as optical kerning, a multi-line text composer, optical margin alignment, unlimited undo, and zooming from five to 4,000 percent. (For a great overview on many of these features, check out Olav Martin Kvern’s article "We’ve Come a Long Way" in Adobe Magazine, available as a 407K PDF file.) InDesign also includes built-in support for PDF files, and can open PageMaker and QuarkXPress documents directly. InDesign’s street price should be $700 (Adobe’s list price is $739); owners of Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker, or QuarkXPress can take advantage of a special upgrade price of $300 until 31-Dec-99. InDesign requires a Mac with a PowerPC 604 or better processor, Mac OS 8.5 or later, 48 MB RAM (128 MB recommended), and 120 MB of hard disk space.