The $2046 package does not provide a clip art editor, templates or free fonts effects.

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Now that we have that out of the way, let's look at what the application does offer: it is making the programmers of Quark Express cringe in the high-end graphic design and print production world, where this application can create colourful advertisements, brochures and glossy magazines as well as newspapers such as Victoria's Colac Herald, see further story below.

Its advanced typography features, which offer the most sophisticated control over how text is presented on the printed page, makes InDesign the publishing package of choice.

A Multiline Composer produces superior text spacing and split-word hyphenation, introducing a hyphenation penalty slider offering trade-offs between spacing and hyphenation and greater control over glyph scaling, which is the practice of changing the width of characters to optimise text flow.

This what a table looks like

Adobe began its entry into the print publishing world with Pagemaker, then Quark Xpress quickly followed to take control throughout most newspaper and magazine sheds throughout Australia.

Sadly, Pagemaker began to take the back seat, mainly because most publishers decided it was (believe it or not) too easy to use. Quark was more complex, requiring a steeper learning curve. It was also the most precise of both applications in terms of measurement and precision.

With the introduction of Adobe InDesign, Quark has suffered a rude shock to its dominance.

InDesign has become a cross for Quark because the latest version is far better than the present Pagemaker, version 7.0, and is making passionate inroads into Quark territory.

A leading Victorian country tri-weekly newspapers the Colac Herald uses Adobe products to produce the tabloid publication.

The paper's chief-of-staff, Bruce Lawson, says the former broadsheet is being produced with Adobe Pagemeh\ker.

Colac Herald's front page

"We create the Colac Herald with a combination of Adobe programs - Pagemaker 6.52, Photoshop 6 and Illustrator 8," he says.

"In the past, Pagemaker has met our needs adequately but the advent of portable document format files for advertisements and electronic transfer of the newspaper to our printer has made the software a little redundant.

"We've found that it is unable to cope with many of the pdf files we receive and would not create pdf files that were 100 per cent reliable.

"Consequently, we're in the process of upgrading to Adobe InDesign 2.0. Why we've gone that way is that InDesign 2, as opposed to its earlier versions, is the equivalent of Quark but at less than half the price.

"I worked with Quark in my previous job and found it a sensational piece of software. But the price! Small business cannot afford $3000-plus software.

"We are presently trialling InDesign 2.0 and find it more than adequate for both our newspaper and commercial printing demands. It also eliminates much of the need to use Illustrator."

There were some serious problems with InDesign 1.5, but verion 2.0 has eclipsed them.

Many of the "technical issues" with InDesign 1.5 were resolved in the free 1.5.2 update. The other issue was less technical, and more related to the printers/prepress houses not seeing InDesign files very often. Even though Adobe had over 200 Adobe Solutions Network Service Providers, this did not cover the entire industry.

Since InDesign 1.0/1.5.2, the industry has adopted PDF at a greater rate. A recent survey by GASAA showed 96 percent of this graphics arts industry used Adobe PDF. Another trend has been to CtP and more modern RIPs/Imagesetters. The full function of these Postscript 3/Extreme devices are taken advantage of by Adobe InDesign 2.0.

InDesign 2.0, due to the increased adoption by small and large customers such as ACP and Murdoch Magazines, more printers and prepress houses are now accepting InDesign 2.0 files. There are some that prefer InDesign over other formats as it presents less problems than other competing tools.

InDesign benefits from tools nabbed from Adobe's other professional design packages, including Illustrator and Photoshop.

You can create multicoloured gradients, an Illustrator-style eyedropper tool copies the properties of any object (colours, line thickness, text attributes and so on) and applies to another with a mere click.

The Colac Herald, using InDesign 2.0

The new InDesign 2.0 features include extensible markup language (XML) import and export support, transparency, table creation, long document support, a superior printing interface, native Mac OS X support, and tighter generation with the Adobe family applications.

Pick up any number of magazines, financial publications, annual reports, brochures, product comparison sheets, catalogues, text books and a wide range of other documents and you will find vast amounts of information presented in tables.

This is one of Adobe InDesign 2.0's new tricks.

After almost two decades into desktop publishing, tables have always been a problem, but no longer with InDesign.

The application offers fast, flexible table-building tools that bring in a new era, simply select the type tool and bring out a text frame, choose Table >Insert Table, then specify the number of rows and columns, clock OK and start typing: it really is that simple!

InDesign also offers a preview mode, where you can see the final look of your design while working on it onscreen.

You can also now add drop shadows to text, ghost back images, create unique special effects with blending modes and incorporate Illustrator and Photoshop assets with transparency intact.

Most printing devices cannot process transparency natively, instead files with transparency applied must be flattened before you print them.

This is something you will be used to doing in Photoshop, but with InDesign 2.0 you use transparency flattener styles to apply appropriate flattener setings when printing or exporting files, while keeping transparency effects alive in InDesign documents.