Publishing, Adobe InDesign turns 20

Originally 

It was originally Page Maker, the page layout program developed by the Aldus Corporation. Aldus was a Seattle software house that had self-imposed the first name of the greatest typographer-publisher in history, the Venetian Aldo Manuzio. It was the year 1985. 

The pixelated portrait of Manutius was also the company logo and PageMaker's own startup icon. As Steve Jobs himself recognized, it was the PageMaker, together with the Mac, Apple's LaserWriter and Adobe's PostScript language, that triggered the Desktop Publishing (DTP) revolution in the publishing industry. 

For the industrial culture of book publishing, which reiterated its rituals such as the phases of the moon, it was a real upheaval in the way of working with contents. The computer took center stage in the austere offices of publishers and was placed on every desk. Although there was a computer on every desk, publishers never became familiar with the technology. 

Desktop Publishing contributed enormously to democratizing the publishing world and getting the masses to publish high quality material. Before DTP, to obtain a typographic print, huge, complicated and expensive dedicated photocomposition systems were needed (the legendary Lynotype, Monotype, Vary-typer, Fotosetter, Rotofoto, Berthold, etc.).

These room machines made it possible to use proportionally spaced typefaces and then mount a page with text and graphics. Always using the codes and tags entered from the keyboard. A job for specialists that the Page Maker began to simplify enormously so as to offer typography to all those who loved beautiful printing even for their own notes. 

The page that was built on screen with the mouse, keyboard and visual tools of PageMaker was exactly the one that was obtained in print on the Laser Writer. For this reason the term (WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get - What You See Is What You Get) was coined to describe this mode of editorial production. Page Maker was one of the first applications of this type. 

Desktop Publishing was born

In the beginning, the material produced with Apple's PageMaker and LaserWriter was not as beautiful as that produced by large typesetting systems and offset presses. Aldus herself admitted that the print produced by Page Maker on the Laser Writer was "good enough" and could hardly compete with the classic typography. 

But sentiment soon changed and the DTP innovation unleashed a tsunami of creativity and popularity that pushed the aesthetic dispute between old and new into second order. 

Even the publishers of major illustrated magazines, newspapers and books began to look at this phenomenon with growing attention, overcoming their initial mistrust. Publishing is very old and very aristocratic and the innovations brought about understandable disturbances. 

Such was the success of the new technology that even the most conservative publishers soon decided that DTP would be their new way of working as well. Thus it was that the glorious systems of phototypesetting and code typesetting went into retirement. 

Adobe Systems 

Who better than others knew how to ride this brand new wave was Adobe, a company founded in 1982 by two technologists who came from Xerox PARC in Palo Alto. 

In that incredible laboratory of technologies of the future, Charles Geschke and John Warnock, founders of Adobe, had worked on the development of a mathematical page description language that would later become PostScript. It is difficult to underestimate the role of this visionary language in the development of two-dimensional computer graphics. 

Steve Jobs tried to buy Adobe just a few months after its launch and, failing, Apple decided to take 20% of the new company. Relations between Apple and Adobe were never simple, albeit marked by mutual collaboration. These finally broke when Jobs announced in 2010 that Flash, Adobe's flagship technology, would not find space on iPhones and iPads. A near knock-out for Adobe. 

Adobe's hole 

Let's go back to the early 1986s. Adobe, already listed on the Nasdaq since XNUMX, dominated, with Illustrator, the sector of vector graphics and with Photoshop that of raster graphics and photo editing. 

However, Adobe did not have proposals for the layout of graphics and text. In 1994 he therefore decided to merge with Aldus, the Page Maker software house. Aldus brought 13 other graphics applications to Adobe, including After Effects, which was the only one Adobe gave continuity to in the following years. 

The merger, which took place on an equal footing (one Adobe share for one Aldus share) gave rise to Adobe Systems. The denomination which he then maintained for many years. The founder of Aldus, Paul Brainerd, gave up all operational positions in the new company. 

The following year, Adobe acquired Frame Technology Corp. which had developed Frame Maker. Frame Maker was a visual layout software for highly structured documents. It boasted automatic typesetting features that were state-of-the-art digital text technology at the time. 

Let's see some features. 

The frame maker workshop 

Frame Maker offered a mathematical notation system (Equation editor) based on the LaTex language, a non-visual tool very popular among mathematicians and in academia. There was also a sophisticated tool for creating tables, anchoring graphics to text, automatically numbering header strings, captions, figures. 

It could automatically manage footnotes, even splitting them across multiple pages, as well as allowing you to tag all text with character and paragraph styles. It automatically generated the index of contents and that of names starting from the set text tagging. 

Adobe immediately added support for SGML, the metalanguage defined as an ISO standard, which would later give rise to today's XML, its simplified version of SGML. 

Developed for SunOS, and immediately after also for Mac, Frame Maker soon became the standard of Unix systems and was also ported to NeXT workstations, Jobs' new venture after leaving Apple. 

Frame Maker had everything that Page Maker lacked. But it lacked the flexibility that graphic publishing professionals, trained using traditional, non-computerized methods, looked for in desktop publishing. From Desktop publishing they asked for a very basic thing: a technological profile emulating the traditional working method. And Frame Maker wasn't quite on that wavelength. But Page Maker was. 

Quark's hegemony 

However, things weren't what they used to be. They had gotten bad. In fact, Page Maker had quickly lost almost the entire professional DTP market to QuarkXPress, a faster and higher performance sister software. Almost immediately X-Press became the darling of art directors and designers at publishing groups and graphics companies. 

In the late 90s, Quark had 777% of the entire DTP market. Even Frame Maker was unable to get out of a niche market made up of large companies with a large amount of technical documentation, such as Boeing. All the documentation of the Boeing XNUMX was, in fact, created and maintained with Frame Maker. But Frame Maker never managed to catch on with the DTP user base. It was too complicated and expensive. 

In 1998, Adobe decided not to continue development of PageMaker. The game seemed closed, but it was the most formidable competitor, Quark, who came to the involuntary rescue of Adobe. 

The policy initiated by Quark's largest shareholder, Fred Ebrahimi, an Iranian-born entrepreneur, based on high prices, low innovation, paranoid product protection, and low customer focus began to undermine Quark's appeal and in the market. 

People got fed up with all the stakes that the Denver company was erecting and with the fact that some important features (such as the relative path of imported graphics, the function to create tables and so on) were still not implemented in the Quark versions increasingly expensive. 

Quark's strategic blunder 

But something more serious than Quark's laziness to innovate happened. Quark interpreted the growth in Windows sales as a sign that users were moving away from the Mac, rather than an indicator of the overall growth of the DTP market which was spreading to compatibles as well. 

Thus it was that Ebrahimi decided to give precedence to the Windows platform over the Mac. Quark was spectacularly late in developing a version suitable for Apple's new Mac OS X architecture, released in March 2001. An important and transformative architecture that would later spin all the operating systems from Apple, including mobile ones. 

At the end of 2002 there was still no version of Quark for MacOSX. Users were forced to work in emulation on the new Macintoshes, thus losing all the excellent speed and performance properties that had led them to opt for Quark. Working in emulation was frustrating and nullified all the advantages of new hardware based on ever more powerful processors. 

Apple teams up with Adobe

Faced with complaints from users, the CEO, Fred Ebrahimi, advised the partners gathered at the Quark meeting in New York at the end of 2002 to "switch to something else from the Mac". 

He justified this astonishing claim with the argument that the Macintosh platform was shrinking and publishing was dying with Apple. Instead the opposite was true. The Macintosh platform was highly resilient in the graphics world, and Windows was perceived as a frustrating stopgap. 

It took Quark two years to develop a version for Mac OS X. Only with version 6 of 2003, Quark was able to offer its Apple customers a native version for the Macintosh. Since the release of MaxOS X Quark had released two versions, 5 and 6, which on new Macs worked in System 9 emulation. 

This delay by Quark in completing the Mac OSX port is said to have played a direct role in Apple's decision to keep the Mac OS 9 emulator until 2003. 

Jobs was furious and decided to throw the weight of Apple on Adobe's plate. After all, there had been a stormy history between Ebrahimi and Jobs. 

Jobs and Ebrahimi 

Ebrahimi and Jobs were two personalities in many respects very similar, stubborn and vengeful. In the late 80s Jobs approached Ebrahimi about porting Quark to the NeXT platform. Jobs was trying to get software houses and developers to write applications for NeXTSTEP. 

In many cases he succeeded, but Ebrahimi opposed a clear and adamant refusal to this operation for reasons that hurt the pride of Jobs. NeXT was to fully fund the development of Quark for NeXTSTEP. For Jobs this did not exist and he repaid him in the same coin. The two ended up blacklisted by each other and set off on a collision course. 

When Jobs returned to a bankrupt Apple in 1997, he turned his attention back to the software developers he saw as key to Apple's fortunes. He put aside his past with Ebrahimi and the two were seen together on stage at Seybold 1998 in New York. 

Ebrahimi stated Quark's commitment to the Macintosh, but did not demonstrate any prototypes of a new release or even advance an outline timeline. Instead, Adobe entertained the audience with a major demo of K2, the codename for InDesign then still in development, and provided release dates for the new product. 

In the same year there was also a clumsy attempt by Quark to acquire Adobe. Quark made a completely inadequate hostile takeover offer from Adobe. The move was to communicate to the market who was in charge in the graphics-publishing industry. 

What happened instead was that Quark's step "catalyzed the energies of Adobe," as Adobe co-founder John Warnock recalled. Adobe mobilized against the threat of Quark. 

Adobe starts from scratch 

It was at this point that Adobe decided to develop new desktop publishing software from scratch. This software needed to combine the immediacy and ease of use of PageMaker with the text processing capabilities of FrameMaker. 

In 1999, Adobe InDesign 1.0 was released. It was well received from the specialized press, users began to consider it, but put themselves in a waiting position. 

Already the code name of the project, K2, showed that Adobe itself knew it had to climb the most difficult mountain to climb, K2, in fact. 

Tim Cole, an Adobe evangelist, introduced the InDesign project to the Sydney Morning Herald on the occasion of the software launch: 

InDesign uses a radically new architecture that is totally different from Page Maker or any other desktop publishing program. This goal made the whole project very complex and we tried to build a 1.0 version which is a mature and high-end application. Thus, the metaphor of climbing the most challenging and fatal mountain in the world is very apt. 

Version 2.0 conquers the market 

But it was only with version 2.0 of 2001 that InDesign began to firmly enter the world of graphic-editorial production. Version 2.0 was a big leap forward from new features. 2.0 could handle tables and transparency. It also inherited all the advanced text-handling properties we described above. Things that Quark lacked altogether. 

Adobe then began to take customers away from Quark even though the Denver company in 2004 could still count on an installed base that was eight times that of InDesign. 

Marketing and pricing strategies (the cost was $700) were the lethal weapons to transform InDesign into the standard of the graphics-publishing industry. 

In 2003 Adobe launched the Creative Suite, a package of applications that included Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat Pro. By purchasing the Creative Collection, InDesign came practically at no cost. 

The Suite was not only a commercial genius, it was also an important technological idea. All applications in the Suite were tightly integrated and interoperable. Objects could be moved from one application to another with copy and paste. Also, swapped objects automatically updated in the target application once changed in the original one. 

In 2006 InDesign achieved the dominant position of the market to keep it until today.