March 2000, Vol. 11, No. 3

InAdobe

New products complement PDF, InDesign, but is it enough to switch?

Adobe admirers: At Seybold Boston the company had a sea of iMacs for attendees to test products. Photo by Ed Levy, courtesy Seybold Seminars

It is sitting here, on the floor next to the desk. The butterfly hovering over a book (which has a picture of a butterfly printed on a double-truck) is colorful and inviting.

But not quite inviting enough.

My official copy of Adobe InDesign remains in its shrink-wrapped box, unopened. I cannot bring myself to even open the box, much less install it. It has been here more than three months.

I used the beta versions of the product extensively last year to be able to form an opinion about the product. I found that it shares many user interface features with other software from San Jose-based Adobe Systems Inc., which at once makes it compelling and distracting.

Let’s face it: I've got Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand on my desktop machine, but they don't make me an artist. I know how to do a few rudimentary things. I've used Adobe Photoshop for more than a decade, but I wouldn't call myself an expert (I'm constantly looking at the manual, in fact).

So the benefits of the Adobe look-and-feel don't help me.

But Quark XPress? I live in XPress. Virtually everything that comes out of my laser printer comes from XPress -- newsletters, collateral material, correspondence. After almost 15 years of using XPress, I pretty much can do anything in it and I mostly don't have to think about it -- it’s all natural.

As many of you have read over the years, I've always looked at the maker of XPress -- Quark Inc. of Denver -- as the company I loved to hate. That is, I loved the product and hated the company.

I thought a new, robust, contemporary page layout program from a company like Adobe would make me quickly migrate. But it’s easier to just stick with the good-old XPress.

I'm not seeing a mass migration to InDesign; publishers are still taking a wait-and-see attitude.

Making the product more compelling, though, Adobe has released two new modules, as detailed inside by Correspondent Steven E. Brier. At Seybold Boston, Adobe unveiled its InProduction and InCopy products that extend InDesign -- InCopy in the direction of the newsroom and InProduction in the direction of pre-press.

In addition, Adobe also unveiled new extensions to its Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) product line, as well as extensive support for eXtensible Markup Language (XML).

It is clear that for newspapers that are using systems that will be based on InDesign -- those provided by Digital Technology International, Baseview Products or System Integrators -- the transition will happen. But what about papers that have integrated XPress into their legacy pre-press environments? Or those that have recently purchased XPress-based systems? What will they do?

Reveling in a new title, Senior Correspondent L. Carol Christopher then takes us through the labyrinth that is the movement to get wire service transmissions from a standard developed in the 1970s to one slightly more current. The acronyms alone make this pretty heavy sledding, but Christopher makes the topic clear.

Elsewhere inside, new contributor James Marchant tells us a little bit about newspaper systems' help desks. Marchant has been a system editor in various guises -- and has been taking help calls since 1975. He currently is the editorial team leader on the Information Technology Help Desk of the Los Angeles Times.

Next, Brier brings us a status report on the situation with computer-to-plate (CTP). Brier talks to some of the battle-scarred veterans of the CTP wars and brings insight to the war.

Lastly, in Hellbox we take a look at the new name for the System Integrators' holding company.

When will that box get opened? To paraphrase the old cigarette ad, are Quark XPress users going to fight or are they going to switch?

-- David M. Cole

From THE COLE PAPERS, March 2000, Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved.