|
Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing (DTP) software application produced by Adobe Systems which can be used to create things such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines and, arguably, even books. InDesign is a direct competitor to QuarkXPress and has surpassed Quark Xpress' market share.
InDesign is the successor and alternative to Adobe's own PageMaker, which was acquired with the purchase of Aldus in late 1994. By 1998 PageMaker had lost almost the entire professional market to the comparatively feature-rich QuarkXPress 3.3, released in 1992, and 4.0, released in 1996. Quark stated its intention to buy out Adobe and to divest the combined company of PageMaker to avoid anti-trust issues. Adobe rebuffed the offer and instead worked on a project built independently of PageMaker, code-named "K2", and released as InDesign 1.0 in 1999.
In 2002, InDesign was the first Mac OS X-native desktop publishing (DTP) software. In version 3 (InDesign CS) it received a boost in distribution by being bundled with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat in the Creative Suite.
InDesign exports documents in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and has multilingual support. It was the first DTP application to support Unicode for text processing, advanced typography with OpenType fonts, advanced transparency features, layout styles, optical margin alignment, and cross-platform scripting using JavaScript.
|