I switched to InDesign at version 1. It's had its issues, but I was willing to put up with them for its features and tighter integration with other Adobe products.
Finally, two years later, ID2 delivers big in some keys areas and really drops the ball in others.
Good:
Transparency and native Photoshop file support. Huge. Nuff said. (can you say, no more clipping paths?)
Tables. They work, they look good, thanks for saving me hours of time. Finally. (did anyone else drop $150 on that total suck ass plugin table maker? Man, I got ripped off. Totally buggy, couldn'y get my money back. Adobe eventually droped them from their plugin link page).
Builtin PDF export., collect fonts, solid preflighting, Opentype support, a few free OPentype fonts.
Bunch of other stuff I won't bother with here, I've hit the big ones.
Bad:
The inventors of PDF can't seem to work it into their schedule to program PDF linking to other PDFs. That's right, a feature that's been in Pagemaker for years, as a plugin for Quark (and now native in Quark 5 I think) is the ability to simply add a PDF hyperlink (to an external PDF) to selected text. This is so lame.
PDF export and EPS export flaky. Try exporting a Press quality PDF and EPS and opening it in AI10 or Photoshop and see what you get. You'll get all kinds of subtle and not so subtle variations. Adobe invented Postscript and PDF!!! It's also amongst all of their own programs and they STILL can't get perfect cooepration between them. Also, PDF export is NOT the same as exporting an EPS and distilling it. I don't technically know the differences, but the publications (newspapers) I work with, including the Chicago Tribune, can't take natively exported PDFs from InDesign. I have to export an EPS and distill. Gee, I wonder if Adobe wants me to have to buy and constantly upgrade Distiller/Acrobat as well as InDesign? Thanks for squashing my productivity Adobe.
Actually, my net productivity is up, but because of their blatant attempts to force me to buy redundant software, it's not as good as it could be. Shame on Adobe.
