4 ms·

> from which InDesign took inspiration Do you have a source? InDesign is much, much more than Latex, and certainly not just a derivative - though your post imp

> from which InDesign took inspiration Do you have a source? InDesign is much, much more than Latex, and certainly not just a derivative - though your post implies just that. Having spent many hobby-years in InDesign laying out newspaper spreads, magazines, covers, I'd argue that it has a fundamentally different, richer, use case, and is incomparable (unless you're just talking about technical documents).

jnbiche 10y ago
> Do you have a source? I don't have the source now, and I may be mistaken. I thought I remembered reading somewhere that InDesign's creators drew significant inspiration from Tex/LaTeX, but I can no longer find the original source. Perhaps I was thinking about QuarkXPress. I did not mean to imply it was a direct derivative. InDesign was openly created to compete with Quark, so its feature set was much more in line with Quark than with Tex. I completely agree that LaTeX is not ideal for designing magazines (although it's used by some academic journals), and its support for cover layout could be better (indeed, it took me longer than it should have to create a fairly simple book cover with Latex just last week). But as a typesetting system, it's great, and works great for books.
- FraaJad 10y ago
  LaTeX is purely for text/formula/equation-heavy academic publishing. It was created for that purpose by Lesley Lamport. ConTeXt - http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page (an open source derivating of TeX) developed and supported commercially by Pragama - http://www.pragma-ade.com/ http://www.pragma-ade.com/ is what you should use for typesetting magazines etc., ConTeXt gives you complete artistic and layout control. While it is used heavily for non-technical publishing, people like Sanjoy Mahajan have used ConTeXt for publishing Math books like - "Street Fighting Mathematics" https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/street-fighting-mathematics https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/street-fighting-mathematics See resulting PDF: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_download/9780262514293_Street_Fighting_Mathematics.pdf https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_dow...

jnbiche 10y ago

> Do you have a source? I don't have the source now, and I may be mistaken. I thought I remembered reading somewhere that InDesign's creators drew significant inspiration from Tex/LaTeX, but I can no longer find the original source. Perhaps I was thinking about QuarkXPress. I did not mean to imply it was a direct derivative. InDesign was openly created to compete with Quark, so its feature set was much more in line with Quark than with Tex. I completely agree that LaTeX is not ideal for designing magazines (although it's used by some academic journals), and its support for cover layout could be better (indeed, it took me longer than it should have to create a fairly simple book cover with Latex just last week). But as a typesetting system, it's great, and works great for books.

FraaJad 10y ago
LaTeX is purely for text/formula/equation-heavy academic publishing. It was created for that purpose by Lesley Lamport. ConTeXt - http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page (an open source derivating of TeX) developed and supported commercially by Pragama - http://www.pragma-ade.com/ http://www.pragma-ade.com/ is what you should use for typesetting magazines etc., ConTeXt gives you complete artistic and layout control. While it is used heavily for non-technical publishing, people like Sanjoy Mahajan have used ConTeXt for publishing Math books like - "Street Fighting Mathematics" https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/street-fighting-mathematics https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/street-fighting-mathematics See resulting PDF: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_download/9780262514293_Street_Fighting_Mathematics.pdf https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_dow...