Adobe has improved the web and interactive capabilities of InDesign CS5. Commonly found in digital magazines, its users now have access to Flash animations and object states. On the web side, InDesign exports tables with IDs. But Adobe has made certain InDesign users cannot do more than create basic interactivity or bare HTML pages from within InDesign.
Adobe’s approach in this area is one of restriction: layout designers must buy, and more importantly learn, the complete Creative Suite —preferably the Design Premium— to get access to Dreamweaver and Flash Professional. With InDesign CS5 we believe it has become clear that apart from designing simple moving objects and some video, more complete web and interactive design is not something that Adobe is expecting layout designers to do in InDesign.
If more is needed, the InDesign user will have to buy one of Adobe’s Creative Suites and learn Dreamweaver and/or Flash Professional, as the web code generated by InDesign does not maintain any sort of layout characteristic beyond the very basic, while its Flash output is limited to formats only Flash Professional can handle. Even the easier to use Flash Catalyst won’t do.
QuarkXPress 8 by comparison lets designers do more with one application if they so desire. QuarkXPress’ web code isn’t perfect —far from it— but at least it preserves the layout of a page, can be created in minutes and without having to learn a single line of code.
QuarkXPress’ Flash support is another example of user empowerment. It’s rather bewildering what a user can achieve with QuarkXPress’ Flash capabilities, all without writing code or without having to go through the steep learning curve of the Adobe Flash application.
In these two areas —web page and Flash project support— QuarkXPress we believe is more cost-effective and efficient for different reasons.
Small designers can offer a wider range of projects to customers using QuarkXPress 8 than they can with InDesign CS5. With the latter, the project types stay within the traditional publishing environment (albeit in two formats: print and digital).
Graphic designers can work in a more efficient and therefore cost-effective way with QuarkXPress 8, because they can take on projects that would otherwise require training in Dreamweaver and Flash Professional if they were to use InDesign —or handing off a project to a developer much sooner, risking design inconsistencies and higher costs.
Perhaps it’s also good to draw the attention to Quark’s growing market share and importance when it comes to delivering publishing platforms. Quark’s XML-based Dynamic Publishing Solutions can be closely integrated with QuarkXPress 8, and as such be far more efficient than what is possible with the Adobe technology.
In 2010, Quark has announced its intentions to empower its users with the introduction of an easy to use export capability to the Blio eReader platform, which enables QuarkXPress 8 users to not only publish rich and engaging interactive content to multiple digital devices but through the partnership with Baker and Taylor, gives access to one of the largest distributors of digital publications in the world.
InDesign CS5 users may have more intuitive tools on the designer level, but it gets nowhere in the larger whole of the publishing processes for which Adobe depends entirely on the success of its third party editorial workflow system developers.
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[...] The IT-Enquirer (which writes articles that I disagree with about 95% of the time) now says that QuarkXPress is better than InDesign CS5 when it comes to interactive documents. I couldn’t even bring myself to read the whole thing [...]
[...] The Executive Summary can be found at: http://www.it-enquirer.com/?p=1105 ———————— [...]