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Microsoft in 2015: Mobile disasters, Windows 10 and heads in the clouds

Pompous Git Silver badge

I am not trolling - InDesign is an application rather than a tool and the Adobe have built it in such a way that WINE does not support it very well. You should be annoyed at Adobe but I am guess that you do not see it that way. I am guessing (Desktop Publishing is not my area) that there is a equivalent and I know that you are going to argue that it is not as good - they used to say that about Office....

If you are not trolling then please accept my apologies. Clearly, we use the word "tool" to mean different things. InDesign is my "tool" for getting a particular type of work done. Despite your "guess", there is no equivalent for Linux. Note that TeX despite being the most sophisticated typesetting tool available is not equivalent. I don't publish books on "mathematics, computer science, economics, engineering, physics, statistics, or quantitative psychology".

I'm not at all sure why I should be annoyed with Adobe. After all, it is Adobe that finished the work commenced at Aldus these many moons ago. If Adobe failed to anticipate MS's recent shenanigans, then so did I!

Scribus is often touted as "more than good enough" by people who believe MS Publisher is "more than good enough". Word documents can only be imported as plain text and all the manuscripts I receive are in that format whether created by Word, Libre Office, Word Perfect, or Wordpad. That means bold and italics for example have to be done manually after import. Scribus supports Unicode character encoding but doesn't support complex script rendering. Scribus does not have OpenType alternative glyph support, so ligatures, for example, are not inserted automatically. Table implementation sucks. Footnotes, marginal notes and ePub exporting are apparently "under development". In short, Scribus makes you do an awful lot of tasks manually that are automatic in InDesign.

When Adobe introduced InDesign, QuarkXpress had 95% market share. There are some very good reasons why Quark is now a mere footnote in history. As Dave Girard wrote: "[Adobe had] made a program that was both for production nuts who needed to work efficiently and creatives who were shown how digital typography and layout was meant to be."

Oh, and the head of Quark had told users that if they didn't like what was happening to the tool of their choice, they could jump ship. Similar to my being persuaded by MS to drop Windows and move to Linux Mint. If Adobe have any sense they will make needed changes to InDesign. Maybe even the WINE developers could make WINE support InDesign better.

Telling InDesign users that they can move to something "as good as MS Publisher" ain't going to cut any ice...

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