Adobe InDesign 2.0 [Old Version]

by Adobe

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B00005T7C9
• Item model number: 27510344
• Date first available at Amazon.com: May 10, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,403 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

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

Amazon.com Product Description

Adobe InDesign 2.0 page-layout software has the tools to inspire your creativity and simplify elaborate design tasks. Version 2.0 offers object transparency, long-document management options, one-step table creation, XML import and export, improved performance, and more. InDesign 2.0 delivers tight integration with other Adobe graphics applications, easy-to-use tools that reduce elaborate design tasks to a few steps, and built-in support for publishing pages anywhere--in print, on the Web, to Adobe PDF, as e-books, and more.

Capture inspiration with the ability to apply drop shadows, feathering, and other editable transparency settings to any object. Use Overprint Preview for proofing spot-color effects and overprint settings. Flexible table creation tools let you turn tab-delimited text into tables in one step. Plus, get faster performance when opening, saving, and closing documents and placing high-resolution images.

InDesign's integration with other Adobe products allows you to work more efficiently. You can directly export Adobe PDF files in Acrobat 4.0 or Acrobat 5.0 format. You'll have the ability to place native Photoshop and Illustrator files with the transparency preserved. InDesign 2.0 also features support for importing and exporting well-formed XML and easier tracking, management, and retrieval of InDesign documents through Adobe's new XML-based metadata framework.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars InDesign is the wave of the future, June 14, 2003

By 

"planet-13" (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adobe InDesign 2.0 [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

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.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars InDesign vs. Quark (a beginner's perspective), April 11, 2002

By 

S. McEnaney (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Adobe InDesign 2.0 [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

I'm currently studying graphic design and have learned InDesign before learning Quark, and the differences amaze me. InDesign is by far the better product: Photoshop and Illustrator files can be dragged and dropped into an InDesign document; frames work for either text or graphics; onscreen viewing has several options from proxy to high-resolution; the list goes on. It has the same Adobe interface as their other products and has a far more advanced drawing tool than Quark. It doesn't offer the character attributes that Quark does - you have to have the bold/italic version of a font to print it that way, unlike Quark's forced attributes ability - but it really does seem to be miles ahead in its details and options. Plus, as a student, it's a much more affordable program than Quark, and it interacts with the other Adobe products so well that I found I was already ahead of the game. I heard that the first version of InDesign was really buggy, but the same people and instructors have had nothing but unbridled praise for version 2.0 .

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The new king of DTP, February 25, 2002

By 

"cueboy" (South Africa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adobe InDesign 2.0 [Old Version] (CD-ROM)

This product has to be the most amazing page layout program ever created.
The features literally overflow and present you with virtually unlimited options for complete creative freedom. The new transparency effects are unbelievable for a dedicated page layout application. This cuts down dramatically the need to switch between photoshop for applying effects such as drop shadows, feathering etc.
Adobe has really outdone themselves with this one, and anyone who believes QuarkXpress is still the best needs to take a serious look at this. Quark 5 is better than quark 4.1 but still doesnt come close to this level of brilliance.
The PDF output is absolutely first class, and preserves every aspect of the document from finely graduated transparency effects to the brilliant typography.
This is a major bonus for users who publish detailed PDF files, and this makes proofing before printing an absolute pleasure.
For such brilliance you would expect to pay a lot more than $699 and at this price this product is an absolute bargain for any self respecting creative professional.