InDesign

InDesign is considered an industry standard among DTP layout systems. With InDesign, Adobe has succeeded in largely pushing former competitors such as QuarkXPress to the margins, while current alternatives like Affinity Publisher and Scribus still cannot match InDesign’s range of features. InDesign’s market dominance is based primarily on its highly precise typographic controls, strong support for creating print-ready PDF templates, extensive automation options, and seamless integration with other Adobe applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator.

For XML workflows, unlike many other competitors, we do not use InDesign’s XML import and export interfaces, which have effectively not been further developed since 2008. Instead, we have relied for years on the IDML (InDesign Markup Language) format, which represents a complete InDesign file in XML and is continuously developed by Adobe. In our view, this approach is less error-prone, more performant, and also understandable for typesetters without XML expertise. With transpect, it is possible either to generate a rough layout from XML via IDML or to convert a fully edited IDML file back into XML afterwards.

Another important option for automation is InDesign scripting. This is primarily based on JavaScript. Adobe provides both the older ExtendScript environment and the more modern UXP environment. This allows layout and production processes to be automated, additional functionality to be developed, and custom dialog windows and panels to be integrated.

Apart from the outdated XML interfaces, InDesign also has other weaknesses that have not yet been fully resolved. For example, support for accessible PDFs according to the PDF/UA standard is still insufficient, meaning that in practice external plugins are usually required. In addition, InDesign can often only efficiently utilize a single CPU core. The main bottleneck is therefore less the available hardware and more the software’s historically grown architecture. For fully automated typesetting processes, Adobe does offer InDesign Server as a server solution, but it is not significantly more performant and also relies on outdated interfaces.