Adobe InDesign 2.0 for Mac

by Adobe

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• ASIN: B00005T7C8
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 5, 2007
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,819 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #26 in Software > Business & Office > Document Management > Print Publishing

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Adobe InDesign 2.0 is simply the best professional print design and layout package available. Version 2.0 outweighs former market leader QuarkXPress and should dominate the future of desktop publishing with significant performance improvements, seamless integration with other Adobe products, and a bevy of sophisticated new visual effects and cross-media integration. Previous versions of InDesign were processor-intensive and sluggish. InDesign 2.0 runs significantly faster and smoother, even on older systems like Pentium I and II PCs. For Mac users, it is OS X native.

Graphic designers will love InDesign's robust feature set, which includes advanced type tools that allow for multiple font-control options at both the character and paragraph level. InDesign 2.0 also incorporates many of the most useful Photoshop visual effects, including editable drop shadows, lighting effects, feathering, and transparency that can be applied to any object--text, graphics, or images. These effects can also be imported with native Photoshop and Illustrator file placement. In addition, InDesign's unlimited multiple undo and redo options offer a major improvement over QuarkXPress.

InDesign 2.0 not only supports tables and multipage table formatting (Quark 5.0 cannot format multipage tables), it can also convert and retain the original formatting of any tab-delimited table data from word processing, database, or spreadsheet documents such as Microsoft Word and Excel. InDesign 2.0 allows for seamless Acrobat PDF file import and placement, as well as the ability to import both PageMaker and QuarkXPress documents (3.3 or later).

As with previous versions, InDesign 2.0 does not support documents created with QuarkXTensions. InDesign also does not allow for export to Quark or PageMaker formats or backward-compatibility file export, as did older InDesign file versions. However, users can export InDesign 2.0 files in multiple media formats, including EPS, SVG, RTF, HTML, and XML. You can also embed Metadata (XMP) into InDesign layouts for automated workflows.

InDesign 2.0's Web publishing options are a significant step up over previous versions but are still fairly primitive; InDesign is emphatically not a Web editor but instead offers limited Web publishing support. The HTML export automatically converts most text to images (rather than exact-positioning CSS layers as one might expect), producing very large files with frequently poor image quality and few image optimization options. There's also no support for browser preview, rollovers, or image maps, which QuarkXPress 5.0 provides. InDesign offers fairly simple and easy-to-use, well-formed XML support (no DTDs) that can both import and export XML tags; the XML in rival QuarkXPress is more advanced but less product-integrated and is DTD-based.

With its focus on visual effects, design production, and prepress and printing needs, plus the added bonus of multichannel publishing support (print, Web, etc.), InDesign 2.0 is clearly intended for professional print and graphic designers. For easier-to-learn and more basic office and small-business document publishing, Adobe PageMaker or even a Microsoft publishing product is more appropriate. Conversely, for large technical publications or larger corporations with true cross-media publishing and content-management needs, Adobe FrameMaker is a better option, with more advanced native support for content markup languages and multiple export formats.

Though InDesign 2.0 offers many compelling new features, there remains room for improvement, particularly for HTML export, WYSIWYG type menus, and more targeted user tools. However, these are small complaints. InDesign 2.0 should be the product of choice for today's design professional. --Rich Ting

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

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pagemaker: 1980s, Quark: 1990s, InDesign: 21st Century, June 5, 2002

By 

David Bergsland at [e-mail] - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adobe InDesign 2.0 for Mac (CD-ROM)

InDesign has added professional capabilities that have not be available in of-the-shelf digital page layout: paragraph justification, transparency, optical margin alignments, optical kerning, OpenType support, and much more. It has added an excellent table editor. The table can even flow, linked, from page to page, and be formatted with paragraph styles.

Any frame can hold pictures and/or type. The list goes on and on. The most common complaint when my students go to the required Quark courses: "It's like stepping back into the dark ages." They all hate it once they have tried InDesign.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars NEWSFLASH: Quark is HISTORY, December 1, 2002

By 

Solo Goodspeed (Granada Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adobe InDesign 2.0 for Mac (CD-ROM)

When Steve Jobs announced that all the new 2003 Macs would only be able to boot in OS X, I figured it was time to step up to the plate, get oriented to the new OS and upgrade our art department. The only thing holding me back was not having a page layout app that ran natively in 10, and I had no intention of working in Jurassic mode. I had heard less than positive things about InDesign 1.0, but figured I'd do the free tryout from Adobe, since it would give me the chance to test drive Jaguar in an all-Adobe environment.

Talk about a revelation. This program's ease of use had me creating usable projects inside of a week, and by the time the tryout expired, I had converted about 150 pages of our company catalog from the old Quark files. That was when I realized how much we truly needed this package. It was as if I'd been using it for years. I could import files from Illustrator and Photoshop without having to save them as tiffs or eps. I could export press optimized pdfs without going through Distiller, that weighed in at a thrifty 4.5 mb ..... not bad when the Photoshop elements totalled over 50 meg! The tables tool is extremely helpful; it functions like a mini Excel, eliminating the need for tabs in charts. The text formatting is a breeze, the preview display looks great even at low quality, and proofs that I output to my inket printer look phenomenal. Just try doing that in Quark without getting nauseous. But wait - there's more ...... layer support and blending modes, transparency, drop shadows, gradiated text, and the list goes on. We don't need no steenking XTensions .........

Adobe InDesign is, at the time of this writing (11/02) still the only layout app that runs natively in Mac OS X (despite Amazon's claim that it is for OS 9 and below, why on earth would Adobe release something like that??), thus completing the Holy Publishing Trinity with Illy and PShop. In a way, Quark has done us a favor by dragging their feet on upgrading, thereby giving us a chance to try out a tool that is so much better, more intuitive and integrated with the other tools we have to use. It's as if Adobe stood back and observed all that didn't quite work about QXP (and that other abomination PageMaker which the company may just as well disavow), and created an app that works beautifully without having to think about it too much. Whatever the case, the timing is right, and we Mac users really appreciate it.

Adobe InDesign and Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar is, quite simply, a publisher's marriage made in Heaven.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars InDesign 2.0 - FINALLY a page layout program with features!, May 15, 2003

By 

V. Maciulski - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Adobe InDesign 2.0 for Mac (CD-ROM)

My favorite features in InDesign 2.0?

Creating baseline grids (to keep your columns of text aligned) is incredibly easy.

A Glyph palette for browsing and inserting any glyph in a font, and a shortcut menu for quickly inserting special characters.

Character Styles to augment Paragraph styles.

OpenType Fonts can contain up to 65,000 characters and you can tell InDesign to automatically substitute swash characters, ligatures, ordinals, fractions, etc., as you type. You don't have to do all the work of using a different face for ligatures and swash characters, saving tons of time.

Multiple undo/redo and automatic recovery of documents after a system or power failure.

Transparency Easily apply drop shadows, feathering, and other opacity settings within InDesign. No more going back to a source file's application for that. Soft edges are maintained when placing transparent Photoshop files! Also maintain transparency in imported Illustrator files, as well as Acrobat 5.0 PDF files.

Text on a Path Align text on a path in few quick steps, and apply special effects, such as Ribbon and Gravity.

Tables are easy to create in InDesign. And you can, import styled Microsoft© Word and Excel tables directly, or turn tab-delimited text files into tables in one step. Quickly reformat the look and feel of tables: Set row height and column width, apply color fills to alternating rows, merge cells, insert graphics, and specify high-end typographical settings.

Importing PDF files is simple. You can choose exactly how it comes in and re-size the PDF for paste up in the document.

InDesign no longer requires the AdobePS driver, so it fits into a wider variety of print work flows, and it offers a consistent cross-platform experience. New printing features include the ability to save high-quality, driver-independent PostScript© files directly from the print dialog box; the ability to print master pages,

Preflighting/packaging controls-I was able to identify problems with linked graphics, fonts, and colors in my InDesign documents using built-in preflighting controls. Then I can use it to package all required files, including the necessary fonts, for hand-off to print production.

Paragraph Composer and Optical Kerning let me fine tune the look of words, paragraphs and columns for high quality typography..

What do I miss in InDesign?

I wish there was a Story Editor that allowed me to view an entire story at once, even if it was threaded across several pages. That's really valuable when I need to cut or rearrange an article for fit.

I would like a palette to adjust the size of a font or its leading or the weight of a stroke up or down in tenth of a point increments by clicking on something or using my up and down arrows. InDesign's character palette's little arrows adjust by a full point only. To adjust by fractions of a point, I have to change to the text tool, click in the boxes and type the exact number.

Final Verdict?

InDesign is a Superior Product for Designers. It saves you from jumping around in other programs to perform tasks, and its typography controls have no match.