Just As I Thought

InDesign InDaHouse

I’m a fickle and tempermental guy. After using PageMaker for years, I dumped it in favor of Quark XPress when PageMaker wasn’t being improved enough for my tastes. Now, after forking out huge sums of cash to Quark for years, I’m tired of their minimal expensive updates to their software, which doesn’t run on OS X almost two years after it’s introduction. So, I’ve switched to Adobe InDesign, and bullied my printers into purchasing it as well.
InDesign has opened a wonderful new typographic world for me, much as XPress did all those years ago. This application puts Quark’s products to shame. I’ll give you an example: I was trained as a typesetter at the beginning of my career, so I pay a lot of attention to type. One thing that always annoys me about desktop publishing is the tendency of the document to look too good – everything in place mathematically. For instance, when a paragraph starts with a quote or other punctuation mark, the mark lines up perfectly with whatever is below it. That’s wrong. The quote should hang outside the paragraph, which seems wrong but gives the paragraph a better color – meaning, it looks more consistent in darkness of type. InDesign does this for you automatically. I used to have to create a separate quote in a separate text block and place it by hand in XPress.
However, all is not perfect in Adobe’s world. I am having the oddest problems trying to get printing and exporting to work – documents print fine on our Oce copier/printer device, but causes horrible crashes with my QMS 2060 and Oce color laser printers. On some documents, exporting a PDF results in a file that can be viewed, but crashes the printer when printed. I don’t have the requisite skills when it comes to fixing problems like this. I used to, but technology has rushed past me so fast that I haven’t been able to keep up. Adobe’s web support is a joke – totally useless, when their website is working.
But Quark has treated me and their other cash cows so poorly that I refuse to continue lining their pockets to the tune of $700 a pop, when Adobe offers me a program that has so many useful typographic features for an educational price of only $149 – with Photoshop and Acrobat thrown in! What a deal. And what a Quark killer.
Now, Adobe, can you make it print?

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