Adobe makes opening day splash at NEXPO '99

InDesign, a new page layout application that has yet to have been released (Adobe's projecting late summer), is in an interesting situation: before its even out, pundits are predicting that it will steamroll its competition, Quark XPress.

The latest theoretical nail in Quark's coffin was this morning's keynote presentation by Charles Geschke, co-founder, president and chairman of the board of Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose.

Following 30 minutes of opening remarks by Newspaper Association of America Chairman William Morris III, Geschke said that he was "fascinated to hear how you're responding" to the problems of the newspaper industry.

Saying that he was the son and the grandson of photoengravers, Geschke told the crowd of about 500 that Adobe based its plans for InDesign on three principals: that Adobe should set the standards in graphic arts software, that it should develop that software in such a manner that it is easily accessible and that it should strongly encourage third parties to develop added functionality to the program.

"It is a componentized architecture," said Geschke. "The result is that 90 percent of the functional capability is open as interfaces to third-party developers."

He went on to call InDesign "inherently flexible."

Marc Eaman -- in the words of Geschke, Adobe's "demo god" -- went on to give a preliminary demonstration of the application. He emphasized the Adobe Graphics Model, which allows for the rasterization of type, photos and graphics on the screen, so that users will truly see what they're going to get. In addition, Eaman demonstrated the product's ability for multi-line composition, showing the same story displayed twice side-by-side. In one column Eaman used multi-line composition and in the other, regular desktop publishing composition. The multi-line composition significantly reduced widows in the story. In addition, Eaman showed an example of optical margin alignment, which allows for characters that don't look correct either flush left or flush right to be offset (outside the margin if necessary) to create an optically flush line.

Eaman's demonstration was followed by demos by Managing Editor Software of Jenkintown, Pa., and Digital Technology International of Springville, Utah. Though while both companies plan heavy InDesign support (Managing Editor's investors include an Adobe subsidiary), Digital Technology's demonstration showed that the company has made extensive use of InDesign throughout its editorial products.

Geschke pointed out that Adobe has at least two other new products of interest to newspapers, including its PressReady and Acrobat 4.0 products.

Eaman demonstrated Adobe Acrobat's ability to editing images in the Portable Document Format (PDF -- Acrobat's native environment) via Adobe Photoshop. Acrobat Exchange and Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator are now all linked together so that items can easily be edited.

Geschke then chatted about another new Adobe technology, Scalable Vector Graphics. A subset of the Illustrator format which has been submitted to the Worldwide Web Consortium for standards consideration, SVG allows for web page objects to be resolution independent. As Geschke said, frequently when you go to print out a web page it is unreadable because of the low resolution of the graphics; SVG will allow for small graphics to be transmitted to web browsers that then have the ability to be printed on high-quality imagesetters (or even just office laserprinters).

In a question-and-answer session, Geschke didn't hold out much hope for versions of Adobe's popular desktop products to run on the Linux freeware operating system. "Linux is not for clients," Geschke said, "but for servers. We just haven't seen enough of a market to port it."

-- David M. Cole