MacAddict magazine and Macsimumnews.com chime in with strong positive InDesign press

With the advent of summer (in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway), positive reviews of Adobe’s page design flagship continue to come in.

In it’s August number, MacAddict reviewer John Cruise returns a rating of 4/5 (or, in MacAddict parlance, “Great”).

Strengths covered in the review (not as yet available online) include object styles, default object styles for objects (”a true timesaver”), anchored objects, Snippets (”like a library object, only smarter”), InDesign’s new word processing-style functions, Quick Apply, and improved MS Word compatibility.

He also cites notable QuarkXPress catchup features–shape conversions, text-wrap for anchored objects, layer show-and-hide in PSDs (as well as PDFs), and show/hide of PS layer comps (”something you can’t do in QuarkXPress”). Weaknesses feature things we’ve seen discussed before–ID won’t generate a new page when entering text into a master text frame, can’t create different-sized pages within a document, no synchronized text, no HTML export-things that QuarkXPress does do.

Despite the room for improvement, reviewer Cruise still opines, in the last paragraph, that “unless QuarkXPress 7 packs a powerful set of new features, the exodus from QuarkXPress users to InDesign is likely to continue”.

Meanwhile, [1] this review readable at Mac news site Macsimumnews.com runs along mostly the same lines, citing many of the same strengths and weaknesses. Macsimumnews.com also notes the lack of a History palette, and would like to see recordable actions in InDesign.

However, despite the flaws, the artcle observes that this update “offers so many improvements and enhancements, it’s easy to see why folks are migrating to the Adobe product from QuarkXPress”.

Overall the consensus seems to be that while InDesign CS2 isn’t revolution, it is evolution, and good strong development, and that QuarkXPress, though much improved, is still in the catch-up position.