Adobe Bets Big On InDesign

On one hand, InDesign is a highly touted professional page layout product, built from the ground up on object oriented technology and offering tight integration with PhotoShop and Illustrator, packages already used by many professional publishers.

On the other hand, Adobe may be lucky that its chief rival is Quark Inc., a company that has alienated customers and partners alike with its closed architecture and resistance to customer input, said analysts, customers and partners.

"The vultures are circling over Quark headquarters," said Jeff Tarter, editor of SoftLetter, Watertown, Mass. "It looks like Adobe has leapfrogged Quark's position with better typography, better precision, more controls. Quark has been effectively a closed environment, and Adobe has been much more open about++plug ins and add ons."

Quark has been "arrogant . . . and created enemies and enormous demand for an alternative," said Don Oldham, president of Digital Technology International (DTI), an Orem, Utah, integrator and ISV specializing in publishing. So, the mere prospect of Adobe coming into the fray sparked tremendous excitement about the product even sight unseen, he said.

Quark, Denver, does have hefty market share, however. "There are lots of wonderful things about [InDesign], but it's hard for a 1.0 version to go after

++something that's been there awhile," said Paul Schmidt, president of ALAP, a Carlsbad, Calif. based developer of Quark and Adobe add ins.

Adobe, based in San Jose, Calif., had been very close mouthed about the product, code named K 2, and referred to by outsiders as the "Quark killer." But last summer, an unsolicited bid by Quark to buy Adobe prompted Adobe to give a sneak peak of K 2 in September.

Adobe Chairman and Chief Executive John Warnock will show the product tomorrow at the Seybold Publishing Seminar in Boston. The next day, Quark Chairman Tim Gill will outline his company's strategy.

InDesign offers powerful typographic controls, including nested text, which flows copy into objects, rectangles, ovals or hand drawn shapes where it can then be manipulated, Adobe said. The product will support Adobe's PDF file format, which itself supports "editable" objects within the file (CRN, Feb. 15).

A designer also will be able to edit and change a PhotoShop or Illustrator document within InDesign. The product was launched by the PageMaker team which "looked at CORBA and COM and built an object based architecture," said David Evans, Adobe senior product manager.

"Third parties can even rebuild the interface for customers. It's a huge plus for the VAR and systems integrator channel," he said.

Adobe's willingness to give developers access to all the objects will let++companies like DTI build "nifty features" into a multiuser system, said Oldham.

"You can do vertical solutions, particularly group enabled solutions that you would have fits trying to do with Quark," he said.

InDesign will better integrate with outside workflow and other systems than Quark. For example, customers can make changes on a page even as it is in the layout process, said Kirk Norlin, director of marketing for Systems++Integrators Inc., Sacramento, Calif.

InDesign will support PageMaker and Quark formats and work directly with vector images, Adobe said. The $699 product is due in the second quarter and requires Macintosh System 8.5 or Windows 98. A Quark spokesman would not comment other than to say the Quark file format will remain closed, although QuarkXpress already enables third parties to build extensions.