Thanks, but no thanks, Adobe
Mike Mepham
ID does have its uses, I suppose, in its handling of pdfs and colour, but as a dtp program, it sucks.
However, with just a few additions, it could get close to the control offered by Corel Ventura 4.2 (first marketed in about 1991) or even it's basic predecessors, introduced 20 years ago.
The wish list (in topics), added to daily by others, who like me have found ID lacking in one department or another bears testament to its shortcomings. But how a program could be put on the market with such basic deficiencies as lacking "no break" lines or styles, no quick method of producing lists, no automatic bulleting and no way of emulating these basic features in a scripting program that needs a degree in computer science to understand fully is beyond me.
So, a few quid lighter, and many, many hours of wasted effort later, ID hits the ultimate filing cabinet. Will someone give me a prod when Adobe gets to version 6.0?
Farewell,
Mike
Michael S. Flynn
So ID lacks a feature or 2 in one department or another - who cares?
No one, anywhere, using any other DTP program, could ever be faster and more productive than an experienced Graphic Artist/Designer who knows and uses ID.
Bob Levine
Bye.
Bob
John Waller
as a dtp program, it sucks.
You're welcome to your opinion but I think you'll find it's very much a
minority one.
Regards
--
John Waller
Mike McCallion
Gene Trujillo
FM and Ventura were made for a different purpose than ID, and if I were creating a long manual with lots of footnotes, indices etc, I'd probably choose FM too.
But for laying out text and graphics, ID is several steps ahead of its competition.
IM oh so HO,
Gene
Olav Kvern
Does this mean I shouldn't post an answer to your question on the scripting forum? What you want to do is fairly simple, even for me, a high school dropout (no, um, computer science degree here!).
You have learned a number of other programs that take quite a bit of patience to learn--why not give InDesign a similar chance? The quality of the result is worth it.
But if you're happy with what you can produce with FrameMaker, Ventura, PageMaker, Publisher, Word, or what-have-you, never mind.
Thanks,
Ole
Mike Mepham
I'll certainly look at anything that might solve the problems that I have come up against in attempting to move over to ID, and I'll continue to peruse the forums for these solutions --- so yes please.
Incidentaly, Michael S. Flynn's correspondence sounded like a challenge to me: I regularly create books of at least 256 pages containing hundreds of different illustrations, complex tabular text items, indexes, tables of contents, running heads and footers, prelims, numbered footnotes, etc, in a matter of hours, sometimes minutes. Are we talking in the same time scales?
This is achieved using well-used templates and pre-tagged text. But I don't think that I do anything special, and I think that any "professional" (his word, not mine) would not expect to achieve similar results in an ancient program called Corel Ventura 4.2.
I think that since leaving art college in the mid-1960s, I have taken on just about every king of graphic design job there is, as a managing director of a typesetting company I operated a number of typesetting machines from Linotype 202 to Linotronic 500, Varitype, Monotype... you name it, learned to code in typesseter language such as Cora V (the predecessor of all tagging), was one of the first to hitch a pc to a typesetting machine, and have experience in every (I mean every) piece of DTP software out there. I also program in SGML, HTML, Visual Basic, C++, Macromedia Director, and many other languages. So I think that I can call myself competent and "professional". When I say that a program is missing fundamental functions, I don't mean that it is missing a one or two "features" (his words not mine).
I'm not without an open mind, and I will continue to revue ID, but at present it doesn't come up to scratch.
Mike
JoeH
> continue to revue ID, but at present
> it doesn't come up to scratch.
Just got my copy yesterday. Awesome product. For a PS
user it feels so 'Adobe' ! Hope you find the best product
for your print needs. I can already say this one is perfect
for me :-)
JoeH, tossing out his old PageMaker forever
Thomas Phinney
InDesign is aimed pretty squarely to compete against QuarkXPress. There are quite a few structured document features that are in Adobe FrameMaker and Corel Ventura that are not in InDesign 2. But that being said, I don't think many of these features are in QuarkXPress either.
Regards,
T
Olav Kvern
It sounds like we have similar backgrounds--I was a Compugraphic hack/graphic designer/illustrator in the pre-DTP days, program in a bunch of languages, etc.
re: "I regularly create books of at least 256 pages containing hundreds of different illustrations, complex tabular text items, indexes, tables of contents, running heads and footers, prelims, numbered footnotes, etc, in a matter of hours, sometimes minutes. Are we talking in the same time scales?"
Yes, absolutely. It does take re-thinking some of the approaches we're used to--InDesign automation is different from (and superior to, in my opinion) what we're used to from other programs. But it's worth it, because we end up with the fanciest "report writer" currently available.<g>
re: "When I say that a program is missing fundamental functions, I don't mean that it is missing one or two "features" (Michael's words, not mine)."
Your largest complaint (that I've heard, so far) is that InDesign lacks side-by-side paragraph composition, as featured in Ventura and Word (but not in QuarkXPress or PageMaker). This is a *workaround* in Word--it was created for early versions that lacked WYSIWYG composition. (When you think about it, it's clear that it's a kludge left over from DOS Word days--we've simply gotten used to it!<g>) The question is not "does InDesign have this capability?" (it does); rather, it's "how does InDesign accomplish this end?"
There are several ways to do it. I think that using an inline table is a good one, but you could also arrange columns on a page/in a text frame in a way that would produce the same result.
It takes some time to get used to InDesign scripting, but I believe that it's better than what is offered in competing products (QuarkXPress, for example, is not scriptable at all in Windows, and PageMaker scripting is not based on an object model), and easier to learn than VBA in Office products. The key, though, is being used to the way that InDesign works. I'd like to help you with that, because, as I said earlier, our backgrounds sound very similar. If your thinking is also something like mine, I think you'll have serious fun with ID once we've gotten through a few of the initial hurdles.
I'll post an example in the thread we've got going in the scripting forum as soon as I can.
Thanks,
Ole
Mike Mepham
Glad to see I'm not the only one who works on a Sunday :-). Look forward to seeing your contribution.
Regards,
Mike
KarenC - Australia
I continued up until Corel v8 and then began switching programs. First, Adobe Illustrator 9, then upgraded recently to v10. I also purchased ID1, 1.5 upgrade and now v2 plus Photoshop 5.5 and upgraded to v7.
Having taught Quark, I don't like it.
My background in code with Compugraphics has definitely helped me now, and I personally love Indesign. I still have a lot to learn, but I used it all the time and am very grateful that I don't have to paste galleys and bromides and cope with chemicals anymore.
One has to find what works for them.
Insight
I have IDD 2 and want to use it all the time. I have a Quark document that has been revised so many times that I decided to reconstruct it in IDD as my client moves forth with more revisions. The Quark file had just become too buggy.
So I have 2 windows open--1 with the Quark file and 1 with the IDD file. After a little messing around with the tracking value, I get layouts that a virtually identical in terms of line breaks and appearance.
It's not such a simple scenario as one might imagine. Adobe might be using a multiline composer, but that claim alone doesn't appear to me to make the layout any better or worse than Quark.
Don't get me wrong, I'm using and I like IDD, but I think this multiline composer stuff is marketing hype.
Vaughn Winchell
Olav Kvern
re: "Don't get me wrong, I'm using and I like IDD, but I think this multiline composer stuff is marketing hype."
Well--when I lay out a 500-600 page book using single line composition (i.e., PageMaker or QuarkXPress), I have to spend literally *days* fixing bad line breaks, loose/tight lines, etc. With multi-line composition, I spend a couple of hours.
If you've set up your tracking/justification values to match your QuarkXPress document, it shouldn't be any wonder that you can't see the benefit of multi-line composition--you've adjusted the layout to match QuarkXPress' (bad, worse than PageMaker) single-line composition. You're not letting it do its work.
Try composing the text without trying to maintain the original line breaks. I bet you'll see that the InDesign version features more uniform spacing from line to line of each paragraph than the QuarkXPress version. That's the goal of multi-line spacing.
Anyway, you're right--the "claim alone" does not equal better spacing. For that matter, having multi-line composition doesn't mean you won't ever have to walk the lines and fix bad spacing. But it will produce better spacing in most cases, most of the time. Which means you can spend more time working on your design, and less time fixing loose/tight lines.
Thanks,
Ole
Ian Anderson
It's one of the first features that my clients (yes, even the ones who can't tell Arial from Times) have ever noticed. It's that dramatic.
Of course Optical Kerning works quite well, too. Honestly, the typographical features were what made me try InDesign in the first place.
Anything that can impress not only me, but also my clients is truly incredible.
-Ian
Mike Mepham
OK, I may have binned ID for the time being, but I'm still lurking the forums and have seen you both leap to the defence of Multiline composer (described by Vaughn as marketing hype). As one of the few who contributed to this thread on the side of the prosecution, I hope that Vaughn will forgive me if I disagree, ever so slightly, with his point of view: yes, there has been a lot of marketing hype, but Multiline Composer is one of the few features of ID that deserves the hype. My view is that ID is still a program with great promise, built on a very solid foundation of typographical excellence. Continuing the analogy of a building, Adobe has built to the eaves, but the roof is yet to be put in place.
And I can't hang around catching cold in the meantime.
Best wishes,
Mike
Ian Anderson
Best of luck while you wait for the roof ;) In another post here, someone put it best, InDesign was created for a fairly narrow market, but it's been widely adopted and put to use for many tasks that it wasn't originally designed for (i.e., technical writing). I use ID for my freelance graphic design projects at home, and for manuals and training documents at work.
I agree that having bulleted and numbered lists, running headers and footers, etc. is needed, but we have to give Adobe some time to work on this.
I just hope that they don't stick us with a "please use FrameMaker" response. No offense to FM, but ID is light years ahead of it as far as flexiblity goes. Besides, we're a company of 100, not an "Enterprise". From a programming standpoint, I don't think that the majority of features people are asking for would be a huge challenge, and I would be willing to pay for the development in the form of an upgrade, as I did with 1.5.
-Ian
Tony Stuart
The plain fact is that InDesign is being used by people to produce books and by and large it is quite good at it. However, there are amazing omissions in its feature set. Just take one example: the inability to use variables on master pages that match paragraph styles through the book to create headers and footers that reflect changing chapter and section titles assigns the hapless user to manually keying or copying these on each page over dummy master items. What is more, when odd pages are added these items get shifted over page numbers, meaning more manual work.
All layout programs can be used to produce publications short and long, pasteboard or regulated, technical or non-technical. InDesign is trembling on the brink of blowing all the competition away, not just QuarkXPress, provided that it continues to add the automated tools that book producers need.
What InDesign (and QuarkXPress) needs to do is to get away from the page by page approach of document development and move to a chapter by chapter approach. Examine InDesign and Ventura's Navigators and you will see what I mean. Surely InDesign users (and I am one) would want to be able to view the structure of their publication as a hierarchy and be able to view the text and graphic components of each chapter/section and rename or shift them, or shift whole chapters or paste whole chapters from other publications, and all the while preserve auto numbering. Structure in publications is not a dirty word. 'Use FrameMaker' is not a solution, Adobe. TOCs and indexes are a great start. Why not go the whole hog?
InDesign should aim to be all things to all people, able to be used, as can Ventura, for a single creative page or a 300-page structured book. To become such a flexible tool will not involve rocket science.
But I do despair when I recall listening to Paul Brainerd boasting that he had gathered together brilliant publishing minds to produce PageMaker and then finding that not one of these geniuses had apparently ever noticed that prelims, main text and appendixes are usually numbered differently in books. Thank goodness InDesign has at last given us section numbering, something that both Aldus and Adobe failed to deliver in PageMaker.
But I live in hope that I will some day I will be producing something in InDesign and not constantly muttering under my breath (as Mike Mepham has done) that I could have done this or that in a jiffy in Ventura.
Ben Dupre
InDesign should aim to be all things to all people, able to be used, as can Ventura, for a single creative page or a 300-page structured book. To become such a flexible tool will not involve rocket science. <
BINGO
Adobe hasn't figured this out yet. In fact, I haven't either. Adobe obviously thinks it can make more money splitting the market between three DTP tools, and that might be true; I don't know. From what I've read here in the forums customers would be happier with a do-all widget.
The economics of increasing market share against your competition are plain. The economics of increasing market share against your own products are a little more convoluted. Generally it's a good idea to eliminate overlap in your product line. When you think you have two products filling the same niche, you transition your customers to the product with the best margins and dump the other. However, you never tell your customers about this until you have a solid transition plan.
What's up for argument here is just where the boundaries lay. Where does niche 1 stop and niche 2 begin; niche 3?
If Adobe changes their strategy (or gets one), we will probably see one product begin to be favored over the others. One product will grow and add features while the others wither on the vine and eventually fall off. This process will be painfully slow because they will of course squeeze every drop of revenue that they can out of the market until the squeezing takes more resources than it returns.
Ben
Olav Kvern
For whatever it's worth, I think that the current arrangement owes more to history and existing user bases/revenue streams than to any sort of plan or conspiracy.<g>
Thanks,
Ole
Ben Dupre
My point exactly! ID is a good move in the right direction. I'm just (like everyone else) frustrated with the Darwinian time scale.
Adobe is playing the Blind Watchmaker.
Ben
Michael Griswold
Can you expostulate a bit on the "history and existing user bases/revenue streams" a bit??
I was surprised at a PM7 after all the hype with InDesign. Surely they don't think an old PM user (like me) is going to migrate to ID and also keep up with PM.
Quark is definitely feeling the pinch with their recent price drop for owners of previous versions. Perhaps it is all the marketing game to bring down the enemy.
It is sad that it can't be about building a better mousetrap but has to be about selling mousetraps better. :(
~m
Michael Witherell
You stated: "Just take one example: the inability to use variables on master pages that match paragraph styles through the book to create headers and footers that reflect changing chapter and section titles assigns the hapless user to manually keying or copying these on each page over dummy master items. What is more, when odd pages are added these items get shifted over page numbers, meaning more manual work."
This may reflect my ignorance, but wouldn't the use of Parent/Child Master Pages be the way to create changing chapter heads. And doesn't the section numbering dialog box have a box to type in what amounts to footer information that shows up in association with the autonumber?
While not headers and footers in the Word or FrameMaker sense; isn't this a viable feature in InDesign 2.0?
Mike Witherell in Washington D.C.
Mike Mepham
I don't know if Tony is a Ventura user, but I think that anyone who has used Ventura's variables for headers and footers knows what he is talking about.
The problem is that we are all thrashing about finding workarounds and scripts to cope with ID's apparent deficiencies (comparing ID with software we have known and loved for many years). Your solution would probably be OK, but doesn't come close to the wealth of features offered by Ventura to handle these essentials.
Mike
angeled
I agree with you, although you can't always have everything in life! i use a variety of programs, quark, corel draw, illy, photoshop, pm, &id2. No one program does everything & the gazillion workarounds were the hardest thing to learn when I entered the prepress field. But - in the beginning all I the hype heard about id was that it was suposed to be all the programs wrapped up in one, which for the most part it has been, but has had just enough deficiences to irk me - like the "Quark-like" idea of having to buy a "build-booklet" plug in. If adobe says & wants to have a do-all program then they should do it - and not by version 5.0! The adobe representatives that I have come across on this list & as a service provider have been most helpful in trying to make id THE program, so I have faith in them do get it done.
Olav Kvern
Well...what constitutes a "deficiency" or an "essential?" That's the real question. Clearly, Mike thinks that the lack of variables is a deficiency--but millions of QuarkXPress users seem to get by without variables, so the feature has been relegated to a lower position on the list of "must haves".
I agree that we should have variables (or something that does something similar), but the fact is that InDesign must take market share from QuarkXPress to survive and succeed. InDesign could pick up *every* current PageMaker and Ventura user and still be an abject failure in market terms.
What Mike and I have been working on in the InDesign scripting forum is not a "workaround," it's a *workflow*. It's about adapting a process used in one page layout program to another. Mike wanted side-by-side paragraphs. InDesign accomplishes this via table composition--that's just the way it works. Ventura does it a different--and, in my opinion, inferior--way. That's all. The trick will be to move his workflow to InDesign with as little disruption to his existing process as possible.
I still think that's possible, and a desirable goal. We'll see what Mike thinks.<g>
Thanks,
Ole
Scott McCullough
It's good to see an Adobe employee participating actively on these boards, especially someone with your experience and (well deserved) reputation.
I'm wondering if you or anyone else on the Adobe staff has been monitoring the "Wish List" thread in this forum. It contains a wealth of feedback from users in all fields and of all experience levels. There are currently 99 entries, making it the longest thread I've ever seen in any of the Adobe forums, and nearly every one is thoughtful and deserving of consideration.
As you note in your post #26 (above), InDesign can't possibly be all things to all people, especially this early in the product's lifecycle. But I think if you take the time to study the many issues noted in the Wish List thread, you'll discover some very compelling ideas that will help position InDesign for success.
Those of us who frequent this board are all striving to leverage InDesign's strengths and overcome its weaknesses as they are reflected in our varying applications. There's no way your product engineers can forsee every potential application for the product, or every problem that might arise in those applications. We're like an army of field testers at your disposal. Unfortunately, we have little sense that anyone's listening. I urge you to bring these issues to the attention of The Powers That Be at Adobe.
Thanks!
Scott
Ben Dupre
Having said that, there a couple realities it might be valuable for all of us to consider.
1. All of the posters in the wishlist thread have already bought in; some may not stay but at least some of their money is already in Adobe's pocket.
2. If Adobe adds all of the features requested in that thread, they are gauranteed to satisfy those users who posted to that thread. It's like an internet poll; "These data reflect only the opinions of those who chose to participate in the poll."
The suggestions have a value, but it's really hard to quantify. I am sure that the product managers for ID are reading the forums, but at the end of the day they have to make decisions that will not only protect existing business but probably more importantly, generate new business.
So what whines have Adobe bent their ear to? The groans and complaints in the Quark forums most likely.
Quick, someone start a wish list over there. <g>
Ben
P.S. Admitedly, I've never used Quark. Do they have forums?
Ian Anderson
I was really shocked and VERY pleasantly surprised by the response to the "Wish List" thread. Even though there hasn't been any (that I'm aware of) response from Adobe to this thread, I can assure you that they are listening. This is after all, THEIR forum, and from the random posts by Adobe Employees here and there, it seems obvious (to me) that they are indeed listening.
If you were around for the 1.0 -> 1.5 upgrade, you could have seen how obvious it is that Adobe is indeed listening to InDesign users. As for their other products, it's not so apparent, but if Adobe can add even just a few of the features on the "Wish List" thread, we'd all be much happier.
It would be really great if Adobe could take the items on the Wish List, consider their possibility for actual development, and then set-up a Poll to allow us users to vote for what they want. Other software companies have been very sucessful doing this, and it would be great if Adobe followed their example.
The reason for a Poll, is because the majority of visitors to most forums (and probably this one) never post. They just like to read along, but without their voice, Adobe won't really know what people want.
-Ian
Mike Mepham
When I started this thread, it began with a rant that was born of sheer frustration with ID. I've come down a bit now, and part of the reason for that has been the helpful concern of Adobe people contributing to this forum. However, I have to admit that I have been mightily impressed by the high quality of discussion in the ID forums. Not since the very early days of DTP have I seen users so eager to contribute to the improvement of a piece of software through discussion and sharing ideas and solutions.
Ben makes some good points about Adobe's marketing strategy, but I believe that ultimately they must take what is said in these postings seriously. Marketing strategy is not always governed by the buck: everyone in business sometimes has a gut feeling about a product and takes a flyer. With ID, the risk would be minimal.
Adobe could not pay for the advice it gets in these forums. With any luck, they will act on it.
Mike
Olav Kvern
They/we do. The messages here are taken very seriously.
I'm the one who spoke up because--thanks to InDesign scripting--I can implement things faster than the rest of the company. I'll be posting two of Ian Anderson's wish list items late this week/early next week (page alignment and bullets). And I should have a more detailed tagged text markup example for you, too.
Thanks,
Ole
Tony Stuart
While not headers and footers in the Word or FrameMaker sense; isn't this a viable feature in InDesign 2.0?>
Actually Ventura currently does have header and footer frames, but I mentioned variables since I see no reason why InDesign, QuarkXPress and Ventura (the three programs I use) couldn't simply provide additional variables other than page number on master pages so that the user can place the variable header/footer text wherever he or she wants.
Tony Stuart
How can Ventura's method possibly be inferior? Using its simple markup codes in formatted (not just text-only) word-processing files it is possible to produce side headings automatically without the need to indulge in table setting or anything other workaround. Ventura has had tables since version 2 but at the same time has offered a powerful side-by-side paragraph facility.
<Olav Kvern also wrote: InDesign must take market share from QuarkXPress to survive and succeed. InDesign could pick up *every* current PageMaker and Ventura user and still be an abject failure in market terms.>
The issue is that if Adobe is going to offer software that obviously can be used for book production it should aim at providing the tools needed, or at least those that other programs provide. It is not simply a matter of picking up users from other programs, which it is already doing, if Quark’s user forum is a guide. Mike and I don’t want things added to InDesign just because we are also Ventura users. The features we are looking for are shortcuts to meeting basic requirements of the book trade. Like Mike Mepham I have been amazed at the time and hassles some users are prepared to suffer in order to achieve the most basic of book publishing tasks. Quite clearly the originators of Ventura had a far greater appreciation of the needs of book publishers than the developers of other programs, and as a user of these programs I have a vested interest in trying to get them up to scratch. Adobe has made an admirable start with InDesign 2.0 and, together with others on this thread, I hope that the good news keeps on coming.
Michael S. Flynn
I've never used Quark either but I know they have forums - the prepress rooms of print shops and service bureaus all over the world!
Olav Kvern
Okay, maybe I overstated my case. But when you put paragraphs side by side in the same text column, it's a table, regardless of what you call it. Ventura's side by side paragraphs are simply a special case of a table format. InDesign makes this explicit.
Word for DOS pioneered the side by side paragraph format because it *couldn't* put paragraphs into a table in a WYSIWYG display. Ventura picked it up from Word, and early versions went through the same non-WYSIWYG contortions (right indents, left indents, baseline shifts, etc.).
re: "Mike and I don’t want things added to InDesign just because we are also Ventura users. The features we are looking for are shortcuts to meeting basic requirements of the book trade."
Understood--I was just trying to add a little bit of market perspective. InDesign's competition is QuarkXPress, which is quite lacking in book production features compared to Ventura or FrameMaker. And yet QuarkXPress dominates book layout as much as it dominates every other area of page layout.
re: "Like Mike Mepham I have been amazed at the time and hassles some users are prepared to suffer in order to achieve the most basic of book publishing tasks."
I do lots of book production. I'm willing to put up with InDesign's limitations (or the limitations of QuarkXPress or PageMaker) to produce books because I cannot accept the tradeoffs Ventura and FrameMaker ask me to make in terms of the quality (particularly the typographic quality) of the finished product. (I'm not saying that it's impossible to create high quality documents using these programs, just that the constraints the programs place on creativity are too severe.)
The assumption made by software companies, to date, is that if you are interested in automation and long document production, you don't care about typesetting, color, etc.--and that if you are interested in high quality creative capabilities, you are not interested in automation and long documents.
They (and I include Adobe in this) are wrong. We want both high quality *and* automation. In my opinion, InDesign is the best vehicle we currently have in driving toward that goal.
Thanks,
Ole
Dominic Hurley
I may disagree with you about the constraints Ventura places on typographic quality (I far prefer its method of implementing hanging punctuation, for example, and I would really miss not having a tracking and kerning editor), but I wholeheartedly agree with you about the assumption made by software companies about long document creators and good typography. I will keep watching ID to see what new long-document support Adobe adds to it in future releases, but I do feel that the third-party "extensions" model can be a trap. I get the feeling that a company (be it Adobe or Quark) may feel reluctant to add to the "out-of-the-box" program features that third parties have created extensions for for fear of discouraging other third parties of creating future extensions. Of course, they could license the existing extensions to keep the makers happy, but that doesn't guarantee the best solution. (For example, I need footnote capability, but I'd hate to see the current footnote extension - I forget its name - incorporated into ID.) Not to mention the fact that you may have to upgrade your extensions when you upgrade the base program.
Cheers, Dominic
Mike Mepham
Your point about typographic quality is taken, and I'm glad for you that you have the time to make this your first priority, however my clients are very happy with the quality of my Ventura and Quark output already. What they are interested in is that I meet my deadlines given an accepted level of quality. If I was dependent on ID to achieve my national newspaper deadlines I would either be out of business in a few months or suffering from a nervous breakdown and a broken marriage.
re. "Word for DOS pioneered the side by side paragraph format". Sorry, mate, but I can remember coding up vertically tabulated text in Cora V (the typesetter language for the Linotron 202) before Word was a twinkle in Bill Gates's eye (he was probably threading beads in school at the time).
I don't want to get too specific in this thread, but you appear to be missing the point about side-by-side paragraphs: the fact that they are paragraphs means that, at a stroke, they carry all the characteristics of the paragraph style. This is infinitely more efficient than the ID tabulation method available.
Mike
Ian Anderson
RE: post 31 here, Thank You! I really look forward to seeing those scripts!!! Also, thank you again for looking into that strange layers problem of mine. If everyone at Adobe is listening to us half as much as you are, we are in good hands :D. Thanks,
Ian
Olav Kvern
And so are paragraphs in a table cell!<g> As far as I can tell, it's the same thing, and we're quibbling about the implementation (which, admittedly, is more awkward--for now).
Anyway, I'll stop quibbling and get on with setting up the example. (Once I get done with a bunch of meetings and a trip to the dentist....)<g>
Thanks,
Ole
Tony Stuart
I join with Mike in stressing that we are not talking about tables here. Side-by-side paragraphs are extremely powerful things. I could macro a formatted Word file with paragraph style names and get side headings to appear on hundreds of pages in Ventura. Creating a table cell or anchoring a text box in InDesign would take ages to achieve the same objective. I wince when I recall having to create side headings in PageMaker.
Side headings are a well-established book feature and InDesign needs to get to grips with them.
Automation in desktop publishing should not be a dirty word. Nobody complains about paragraph styles or page numbers, so why assume that people should use FrameMaker or Ventura if they want more automation? Adobe should be as anxious as anyone to save its users’ time in achieving basic publishing tasks.
<Ole also wrote: I cannot accept the tradeoffs Ventura and FrameMaker ask me to make in terms of the quality (particularly the typographic quality) of the finished product.>
I agree with you about FrameMaker but not Ventura. It has very few typographic tradeoffs. The ability to set the position and thickness of its single and *double* underlining is an absolute boon in setting financial statements and invoices. Its underlining also can cover empty spaces. Clever stuff, and available since the mid-80s. There are other examples of well-designed typographic features.
I have already advised Adobe to take the time to examine Ventura. Clunky QuarkXPress is hardly the source of all inspiration. The market dictates that I use InDesign, QuarkXPress and PageMaker most of the time, but each of these programs suffers greatly from not trying to steal ideas from Ventura. Its present small market share has nothing to do with its ability to carry out basic publishing tasks, which in most cases is far superior to the efforts of its more fancied competitors.
I will now retire from the fray. I have made my point to both Adobe and this forum and just hope that InDesign keeps getting easier to use for book work.
Jennifer Rosenberg
come up with a novel way of keeping page number references straight even
when there isn't continued text on the page being referred to.
For example, we'll have an article which will refer to an advertisement or
editorial. I will simply flow a tiny box (not big enough to contain a
letter) from that column onto the page in question, often grouping it with
the relevant ad or editorial text so that it can't be separated, even if the
ad or text is moved (either by moving pages or by grabbing and dragging). I
then use the "Insert next page number" command on my context menu (right
click). This only works when you have one reference per column, though it
might be (?) possible to use an inline frame... I'm not sure if an inline
frame can flow.
Jen