Adobe turns new page in design technology

By Adam Gifford

Adobe has stepped aside from pitching its PageMaker software against rival QuarkXPress in a head-to-head battle.

Instead it is offering a new product, InDesign, as a high-end page layout tool for designers and printing houses, with PageMaker now targeted as the ideal in-house publishing software for businesses.

A demonstration of InDesign at an Adobe roadshow in Takapuna a week ago drew appreciative comment from designers, who were particularly impressed by the advanced typography features.

Nick Hodge, Adobe's application specialist for the Pacific region, said InDesign's modular architecture had been six years in the making, and the application itself had taken two years to pull together.

It used a lot of technology from Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat and other Adobe software, including common commands, tools, palettes, and keyboard shortcuts.

Because it was object-based, new features could be added as plug-ins without requiring major rewrites of the underlying code.

"It's very design-oriented, so people can be more creative," Mr Hodge said.

To protect customers' investment in previous work, InDesign allows designers to open QuarkXPress and PageMaker files directly.

Document-wide layers help users to organise and manage design elements, or set up different versions of a publication in one file. Designers are free to experiment knowing they can undo and redo multiple steps.

Mr Hodge said new typographic tools, including innovative optical kerning controls, automatic ligatures and a multi-line composer for automatically setting optimal line-breaks, gave greater precision and control.

"InDesign will change the way people lay out pages," Mr Hodge said.

"Every time Adobe releases a new product, I can look at magazines or posters or Web sites and say, 'Hey, they used that feature'."

He said InDesign was part of Adobe's push to become the software solution provider for cross-media publishing, something which was becoming standard in the design world.

InDesign will be released in the next couple of months. It will cost $1720, plus GST, but for the first three months owners of present versions of Photoshop, Illustrator or PageMaker can buy it for $570, plus GST.

Mr Hodge said PageMaker would still suit many customers, particularly businesses which did not have dedicated graphics departments but still needed to produce professional-quality business documents.

It was also more suited to book design, especially where indexing was required.

PageMaker 6.5 Plus includes more templates, photos and artwork, 4700 professionally designed stock illustrations in Adobe Illustrator format, hundreds of design templates and 300 high-resolution CMYK photos.

The Windows version has a plug-in which creates a Microsoft Office-style, icon-based tool bar with shortcuts to commonly used PageMaker features.

It comes with Photoshop 5.0 LE, a limited edition of the world standard photo design and production tool, enabling users to edit, retouch and enhance images for an exact look.

Other products demonstrated at the roadshow included a new release of Acrobat, which Adobe is promoting as the ideal tool for simplifying and improving exchange of electronic documents across multi-platform environments; PressReady, which allows print and design shops to turn a low-cost ink jet printer into a PostScript printer to produce high-quality proofs; and GoLive 4.0 Web publishing software.

Mr Hodge said Adobe's PageMill was not keeping up with advances in Web design tools.

"The choice was build or buy, and we decided to buy GoLive Systems," he said.

The acquisition was completed in January, and the first Adobe version of GoLive, 4.0, came out for Macintosh in March. The Windows version is now available.

"It has excellent page design and site management, so you can use site view templates, manage colours, fonts and external URLs centrally," Mr Hodge said.

GoLive can also handle XML (extensible mark-up language) without smashing the tags, something some other Web design tools cannot do.

The new products and revised focus are reflected in Adobe's bottom line.

Adobe Systems Incorporated's preliminary results for the quarter ended June 4 indicated revenue will be about $US245 million ($450 million), which is at the top end of analyst estimates.

The company also announced restructuring which will cut employee numbers by 9 per cent worldwide.

Most of the job cuts come from getting rid of regional offices and centralising marketing and administrative functions. New Zealand is now included in a new Americas and Pacific region rather than Asia Pacific and Latin America. The other regions under the new set-up are Europe and Asia.