Why I buy this one ?
- The ideal solution for designing professional page layouts using rich creative options
- Boost efficiency through productivity enhancements and tight integration
- Automate workflows and processes, including long-document publishing
- Flexible XML import and export controls and robust scripting support
- Design compelling page layouts that include transparency, creative effects, and gradient feathers

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What our customer's say!

"Hard to "Design" a better product", Let's start with a few disclaimers. If you don't have at least 2 Gigabytes of RAM on your computer, 50+ gigabytes of memory and a processor running at 1.5 gHZ or faster, there's a chance that this program will give you some issues. Additionally, as I've just learned from the earlier reviews, this program has the tendency to "bug up" from time to time. I've never had such a problem, but I'm certainly not the only in-design user out there.

Everyone has that set of programs on their computer that they go back to, time after time, either out of necessity or out of love. For me, those programs would be Mozilla Firefox, Google Earth, Microsoft Word and--surprise, surprise--Adobe In-Design 3. Certainly, the last enjoys far less attention than the first three, but that's why I'm writing this review. If I can get the everyday consumer to stop, pause and examine this gem of a program a bit more closely, I'll be doing my job.

Adobe In-Design is, among other things, a layout program. "I already have one of those," you think to yourself, and point to your Frontpage, Pagemaker or Microsoft Word CD. That's what I thought for the better part of my life. I was satisfied with the design capabilities of Word; sure, they weren't what the Post or the Times would use, but I got by. That's when a high school journalism class introduced me to In-Design. The software, complex and intimidating at first, soon became second nature as I mastered all the little quirks of the program.

Let's get one thing straight before we move on: this is not the type of software you want (or need) for Julie's fifth birthday invitation or the bakery's "Help Wanted" ad. In-Design is an expensive program. It also gives you a 747's worth of knobs, switches and settings to play around with. After 3 or 4 years of In-Design experience, I can safely say that I've only mastered 20% of the program. If you're looking for a simple, quick and cheap software, exit out of this page and do not return.

If you're still reading, that means you want to bring your design enterprise to the next level. This is where I explain why I gave this little box five stars. In-Design gives you more control than you can ever imagine. It's tailored to the professional; though I can't bring up any links, I'm pretty sure that some of the world's largest newsletters, newspapers and magazines run on it or a like program. Adobe In-Design doesn't just replace the cursor with a box-and-grid format; it lets you fine-tune your boxes, grids, text boxes, pictures and graphics to an unrivaled extent. ID lets you manage strokes (borders), swatches (color palettes), individual hue options, multiple pages and a plethora of text effects. One of its best features is "Object Styles," which allows you to set up a predetermined design for a box or graphic and replicate it across multiple versions of that box/graphic.

In-Design lets you adjust the font, leading, tracking, kerning, horizontal and vertical scaling, baseline shift and skew FOR A SINGLE LETTER. It goes to the thousandth of a pica in box measurements. (That's a thousandth of a 72nd of an inch.) There's also the good old pen tool, armed with a dizzying array of line and curve options. Forgive me if it sounds like I'm listing features; when it comes to a program like CS3, you tend to lapse into that sort of tone.

Admittedly, I'm not a professional designer. My pitch is better than that, though. In-Design MADE me want to become a professional designer, even if I'd had almost no layout experience beforehand. If you want to see how far Adobe's unmatched design program can take you, I would highly suggest adding this program to the toolbox. Expensive it might be, but InDesign is worth every cent.



"Not worth upgrading from CS2", I have been using this program for the last 4 months and I have to say that I cannot find any reason to upgrade from CS2 to CS3.

First there are a few annoying bugs, the one that affects me the most is that when switching between Adobe products and other windows, eventually InDesign CS3 will simply vanish. It will not be in my taskbar, and it will not show up in the Applications tab of the taskmanager. You have to search for the Process Indesign.exe in the processes tab and kill it before you can restart InDesign CS3 to continue using it.

Also the new palette system is much, much worse than what was used in CS2. In CS2 you could dock the palettes to the side of the application, and when you were not using them you could click on the palettes and they would fold into the side of the program, with just tabs with text labels visible, but easy enough to find an open with a click. You could dock palettes to the left and right of the program, which I did since I use a lot of palettes all the time.

In CS3 the palettes can be docked to the sides, but you cannot dock a palette directly beneath the toolbar. The toolbar has its own "drawer" and any palettes docked on the same side as the toolbar push the toolbar out and make a second drawer, which defeats the purpose of of docking things to the side. Also the nice tabs with text labels have been replaced with little icons, which are just a pain to learn. The toolbar has enough icons, I don't need more palettes with little pictures on them when all I want to to adjust the transparecny of an element. Also another annoying thing is that they changed the "Transparency" palette, which adjusts transparency, into the "Effects" palette. For the first 3 days I thought they had simply removed the ability to adjust transparency since I could not find the transparency palette (which is what this similar palette is called in ALL other Adobe programs.. so much for keeping your interfaces uniform..)


All in all this program is not worth the upgrade. It is buggy, has no new features that are worth anything, and the new palettes are a step backwards in terms of useability.

"Lots of Potential ... but Lethally "Buggy"", I purchased Adobe InDesign after using Adobe GoLive and being extremely satisfied with the latter's sleek GUI, compatability with Adobe Illustrator and overall ease-of-use. I suspect that Adobe InDesign boasts the same qualities ... if you're actually capable of installing it. I carefully spec'ed the product before buying it to ensure my PC met the requirements and found out that it exceeded the requirements in every way. When I went to install the product, it initialized but would never install ... worse yet, the installer just disappeared and never displayed an error. When I looked on Adobe's website, it stated that "Adobe is aware of the issue and is currently researching the causes." The website proposed some possible fixes; none of which worked in my case.

The folks at Adobe, despite some valiant attempts, could not determine what caused the installation problem and had me attempting to do everything from installing additional RAM (above and beyond the requirements on the packaging specs)to uninstalling and reinstalling Internet Explorer, the whole Adobe suite, and my operating system. After 2 days of back-and-forth support conversations, I finally gave up and returned the product. It seemed incredible that the software did not have a proper installation logging and debugging program. There was a lot of whispering among the tech support representatives that many of the issues were related to Adobe's change in installation procedures with the new installer versions requiring Adobe Flash.

I am a huge Adobe fan ... I have been using Adobe Illustrator and GoLive for several years now and have only positive comments about them. However, if you're going to purchase Adobe InDesign, I recommend you buy the CS2 version until Adobe debugs the CS3 version. Once Adobe straightens out the CS3 version, you could always upgrade ... and the extra cost would certainly be justified by the time savings of trying to debug this quirkly little version.

"Do NOT upgrade if you do books", If you use InDesign for books requiring indexes, do NOT upgrade to this version. InDesign CS3 (for both Windows and Macs) has serious problems with indexing multi-document books that does not exist in CS2. It drops entries and scrambles page numbers seemingly at random, while giving no warning that something has gone wrong. Any index it produces cannot be trusted. Imagine a publisher printing 50,000 copies of a book with a defective index and you get a sense of just how dreadful this problem is. Adobe could be sued for a flaw this serious.

This bug was reported on Adobe forums back in late April, five months ago. I've talked to Adobe programmers and staff about it. They can't do any more than suggest a script that combines multiple documents into one, where the problem apparently doesn't exist. The real fix is awaiting upper management approval of a "point-release," which must mean the CS3.1 version. But this fix doesn't require a point-release. Every few weeks, Adobe's updater patches CS3 for some trivial reason, typically tweaking Adobe Bridge to sell more stock photos. They could do the same with this dreadful index bug.

Adobe CS3 contains quite a few improvements that make the upgrade worthwhile for most users. But if you create indexes from multidocument books, I suggest you wait until this problem is fixed before upgrading. And if you don't hear otherwise, that means InDesign CS3.1

--Michael W. Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien: A Chronology and Commentary for The Lord of the Rings