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Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing (DTP) application produced by Adobe Systems. Launched as a direct competitor to QuarkXPress, it initially had difficulty in converting users. In 2002, however, it outsold its competitor, partially because it was first to release a Mac OS X-native version. Also, InDesign CS and CS2 were bundled with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat in the Creative Suite, allowing users to purchase all 4 programs for a price only slightly higher than that of QuarkXPress alone.

InDesign is rapidly overtaking its competitors in the high-end DTP market because its rich feature set makes it more powerful in those workflows. While it's known that InDesign's market share is still smaller, estimating market share is difficult, especially because InDesign has penetrated certain industries more than others.

InDesign can export documents in Adobe's Portable Document Format and offers multilingual support that Quark users can get only by purchasing a much more expensive "Passport" version. InDesign was the first major DTP application to support Unicode for text processing, advanced typography of OpenType fonts, advanced transparency features, layout styles, optical margin alignment. The cross-platform scriptability using Javascript sets it still apart. Finally, it features tight integration and user interface similarities with other Adobe offerings such as Illustrator and Photoshop.

InDesign was positioned as a higher-end alternative and successor to Adobe's own PageMaker. InDesign's primary adoptor's are periodical publications, posters, and other print media. Longer documents are usually still designed with FrameMaker (manuals and technical documents) or QuarkXPress (books, catalogs). The combination of a relational database, InDesign and Adobe InCopy word processor, which uses the same formatting engine as InDesign, is the heart of dozens of publishing systems designed for newspapers, magazines, and other publishing environments.

New versions of the software introduced new file formats. Adobe had upset its user base because significant changes in InDesign CS prevented users from downsaving to older versions of InDesign. However, with the new release of InDesign CS2, opening a higher-version document in InDesign CS is allowed through the InDesign Interchange (.inx) format, an XML-based representation of the document. Versions of InDesign CS updated with the 3.01 April 2005 update (available free from Adobe's Web site) can read files saved from InDesign CS2 exported to this format.

Adobe is currently developing InDesign CS3 (and the rest of Creative Suite 3) as a Universal Binary (a program which runs natively on both Intel and PowerPC Macs). It's expected to ship in Q2 2007. Because CS2 was not coded in Apple's XCode language, porting these products is a huge endeavor. Adobe decided to devote all its resources to developing CS3 (including integrating Macromedia products acquired in 2005) rather than recompiling CS2 and developing CS3 simultaneously. This decision has upset many Intel Mac early-adoptors, especially since Adobe initially announced it would be first with a complete line of Universal Binary products.

Versions
InDesign 1.0 shipped August 16, 1999.
InDesign 1.5 shipped in early 2001.
InDesign 2.0 shipped in January 2002 (just days before QuarkXPress 5).
InDesign CS (3.0) shipped in October 2003.
InDesign CS2 (4.0) shipped in May 2005.
InDesign CS3 (5.0) expected release in Q2 2007 (Including Universal Binary versions for Intel-based Macs)