I use Adobe InDesign for page layout tasks instead of QuarkXPress. I started out using Adobe PageMaker years ago, and stuck with it even as throughout the mid-to-late 1990s Quark offered a much better piece of software. Coming from the “old school” days of paste-up layouts (I used actual paper and an X-Acto knife to design pages), PageMaker was a little more intuitive for me getting into digital design. But that was nearly a decade ago.

Today, InDesign can just do more than QuarkXPress. In color management, large document management and general layout tools it has what we need--and a lot of stuff we only use rarely--and it’s all implemented well. Some that I use quite a bit are (and to be fair, Quark has most of these):

• Excellent text editing tools (I write quite a bit directly in InDesign) including on-the-fly spell and grammar checking similar to Microsoft Word
• Great drag-and-drop interface, where many graphics and text items can be dragged from the desktop directly into InDesign and vice-versa
• Great multiple master pages feature
• Well-implemented color management features
• Special effects like soft drop shadows and customizable rules and fills

It works well with Photoshop. Photoshop has become my “bread and butter” graphics program. Because I can import raw Photoshop files into InDesign, and it routinely handles layers and transparencies, as well as complex color models from Photoshop, InDesign has greatly streamlined my workflow. No longer do IAnd editing graphics is easy--double-clicking on the Photoshop file brings it right up in Photoshop, and upon exiting the file it’s automatically updated in InDesign.

It’s stable. InDesign rarely crashes my computers. This is a big deal if I am trying to be productive with software on a daily basis. I want software that doesn’t croak when given a 100-page document to crunch, or a 300 megabyte color graphic to place, or two dozen fonts to manage. InDesign is stable when working with large and complex files.

It’s really good at PDF. Portable Document Format (PDF) files have changed the way I work. Now instead of printing proofs and making paper markups, I export layouts as PDF files and email them throughout the office or to lay leaders or clients off-site. Adobe invented PDF, so anything I make in InDesign can be exported as a PDF. And of course all of the effects and graphics I work on within InDesign export properly in PDF format. This greatly smooths my workflow.

It’s cross-platform. I prefer to work on Macintosh, while others I work with and work for are on Windows machines. InDesign is cross-platform, which means something I create on the Mac version opens just fine on the Windows version. Today with the advent of OpenType fonts, which are also cross-platform, I rarely have an instance where I cannot transfer a graphic layout between Mac and Windows machines seamlessly.

About the Author. Eugene Mason has more than two decades of experience in ministry communications and technologies. More...