Thanks to the rah-rah from good pals Carlo and Terry, I’m now an InDesign convert — a mere 12 hours after they convinced me to give it a try. This is actually a big deal because I’ve been a loyal Freehand user since the Aldus days. I only started enjoying MX a few months ago so I didn’t care about InDesign until our print producers requested that I use it for the magazine’s next issue. I’m taking some time to learn it and I can’t believe how much I’ve been missing, gee. InDesign makes it so much easier to control how characters kern, how paragraphs flow, and how text runs across columns. I know Quark Express can do that, too, but the thing I didn’t like about Quark* and the old Pagemaker was that I couldn’t draw vector shapes with them. Freehand, meanwhile, was a blend of Illustrator and Quark, but it had limitations. For one, I often have to manually space type to control how it looks. It’s really for graphic work than for publishing, and even then, colors do not translate exactly as I’d like them to in different applications. InDesign might be the key to solving those limitations. I could be gushing too early but I have a feeling that this program will take a beating from me in the next few months.
*not this Quark — this one I like, hehe! (:
