The Quark-killer has finally landed. For the last year, the hype about Adobe's replacement for the worthy but old-fashioned PageMaker (reviewed issue 22, p108) has been building to fever pitch. According to the leaks and rumours, InDesign would provide a new level of interface control, the power of frame-based layout, new standards in typography, seamless integration with Illustrator (reviewed issue 16, p106) and Photoshop, native Acrobat PDF editing and commercial print output and a radically new architecture, open to both scripting and third-party extension. In short, it would be the next generation of DTP program that would leave rivals, most obviously QuarkXPress (reviewed issue 7, p98) floundering. Now the product has actually arrived, it's finally possible to unpick the hype from the reality.
The first point that hits you when you load InDesign is how much the future resembles the past. All Adobe packages share a similar look and feel, and InDesign is no exception. In fact, with so many floating palettes in common, you may think that you've opened Illustrator by mistake. The huge advantage that this offers is that you can hit the ground running and begin working with InDesign immediately. Moreover, with so many palettes, tools and shortcuts working exactly as they do in Illustrator and Photoshop, you can generally use the advanced skills you've learned in one Adobe application in them all.

A little exploration reveals that Adobe has also introduced some modern interface enhancements. The view control is particularly impressive, with built-in anti-aliasing, a zoom range between five and 4,000 per cent and the ability to have multiple views of the same document, so that you can work on one page while seeing how the changes you make affect another. Even more useful is the multiple undo, limited only by RAM, which allows you to experiment freely, safe in the knowledge that you can always return to an earlier stage of design. InDesign also breaks new ground with its ability to customise. By using the Shortcut Editor, you can specify any keyboard combination as a command shortcut. Adobe even offers a set of predefined XPress shortcuts to help keep Quark converts productive as they acclimatise.
The Shortcut Editor is certainly an advance for Adobe, but it's hardly cutting edge compared to most modern applications, where not just shortcuts but every menu and toolbar can be customised. In fact, this could never happen with InDesign as the program doesn't offer toolbars. Why Adobe should think every other software developer has got it wrong on this is mysterious perhaps it's a misguided attempt to save screen space. If so, it would be better if Adobe instead rationalised and streamlined its floating palettes. InDesign offers 18 of these, including a separate Story palette that offers control over just one option. Sadly, this is pretty typical. Without features like import previews, tabbed dialogs and most infuriating of all a font preview, the InDesign interface certainly doesn't set new standards. The benefits of familiarity are all well and good, but this is a missed opportunity that leaves the all-new InDesign feeling disappointingly old-fashioned.

Page layout
Superficially, InDesign is a bit of a let down, then, but what really matters in any program is the underlying engine. In a DTP program the layout engine is paramount and here Adobe has learned the lessons from PageMaker. With PageMaker, layout was dealt with on-screen much as it had been manually, with single columns of galley-style text and graphics positioned on an underlying layout grid. This offered plenty of creative flexibility when initially designing the page, but imposed restrictions later. To change from a two-column to a three-column grid, for example, required manually resizing and positioning each text block. The inherently rectangular nature of the text blocks also severely cramped design options, while the inability to define empty text blocks made it virtually impossible to set up re-usable template designs.

The solution to all these problems is to use a frame-based approach. The fundamental difference between InDesign and PageMaker, then, is that as with XPress and Corel Ventura (reviewed issue 10, p88) all text and graphics are automatically assigned to containing frames. This means that you can set up a design purely with frames into which you later flow your text and add your graphics. Frames also provide much greater control. Select the Text Frame Options command and you can change the number of columns, the size of the gutter and margins (along with the baseline offset) and the text will reflow accordingly. The Fixed Column Width option ensures that resizing the width of a frame automatically adds or subtracts full column widths.

Most layouts will probably still keep to a rectangular grid, but InDesign certainly isn't limited in this way it also offers oval and polygonal frame options, editable with the Direct Selection tool. Alternatively, by using the Pen and Scissors tools and the ability to combine objects as compound paths, you can create just about any shape and then use this as a frame. By using the Create Outlines command, you can also convert selected text into editable outlines to create striking photographic title effects. One important effect that's surprisingly not in place, however, is the ability to create text on a path.

So far, the functionality of InDesign's frame handling is a huge advance on PageMaker's largely freeform text blocks, but it's still only catching up with the likes of Ventura and XPress. Where InDesign comes into its own is in its ability to nest frames one within another. If you convert a pullout quote to a frame and paste a bitmap into it, for example, the in-line graphic will remain part of the automatic text flow while still allowing complete control over the size, position, rotation and other attributes of each embedded element. Even better, using the Scale and Shear tools or the Transform palette, you can automatically resize, stretch or skew a frame with the same transformations automatically applied to all the frame's contents, whether text or nested frames. When working like this, InDesign seems far more like a drawing program than a traditional DTP application and the resulting flexibility it offers, from minor tweaks to major repurposing, is invaluable.
Handling the Pages palette
As well as its introduction of frames, Adobe has also reworked the way it handles pages in InDesign. These are now managed with an entirely new Pages palette that allows pages to be quickly added, deleted, duplicated and reordered. The palette is also used for marking off sections of a document to enable different section numbering and also for marking off spreads of up to ten pages that the reader will see simultaneously. This ability is particularly important when designing the gatefold and accordion foldouts commonly used for brochures and leaflets.
The bottom half of the Pages palette is used for handling master pages. These act as the templates on which new pages can be based by specifying general margin and column layout, as well as controlling all repeating items, such as headers, footers and backgrounds. The implementation of master pages is particularly strong, with the ability to base one master on another so that, for example, changing the date on the features master also ripples through to all news pages. Master items can also be overridden on individual pages so that, for example, the position or size of a master frame can always be altered. Attributes that haven't been overridden remain linked, so that if you now
change the master frame's fill or stroke this will still be updated.

Further control over the layout of pages is available through InDesign's grids and guides handling. Grids are reg