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The current version of Adobe InDesign costs $20/month on subscription. Used copies of older versions can be found for relatively cheap. I would advise anyone w

The current version of Adobe InDesign costs $20/month on subscription. Used copies of older versions can be found for relatively cheap. I would advise anyone who values their time against using LaTeX for any document that doesn’t primarily consist of mathematical formulas.

nobleach 9y ago
I used to do all my docs in Adobe Framemaker. The output was amazing. The software itself felt a little obtuse, but seeing the printed pages was great.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Fair enough. My wife uses Adobe tools for typesetting, she is a professional (she pays $100/month for her CS subscription, however). I'm not a professional, I've looked at the amount of effort needed to refine output in these tools and they make LaTeX look usable...
- jacobolus 9y ago
  I find that in most cases InDesign takes an order of magnitude less time/effort and dramatically less frustration to get a particular careful output than MS Word, LaTeX, or other commonly available tools. Your wife probably has difficult requirements and exacting quality standards, and could likely get output with quality equivalent to common documents prepared using amateur/automatic tools in a much shorter time, if she wanted to. It’s almost impossible to do professional quality typesetting in MS Word. Last time I really tried was about 10 years ago. I spent like 4 hours trying and failing to fix basic typographic mistakes in another person’s 20-page document, and then gave up and did the whole thing over in InDesign in 20 minutes, with great results. In LaTeX, you can theoretically do anything you want but unless there’s already a template for it (or you have numerous or long documents targeting the same output style, for which you want to make a template and then mostly rely on automatic layout), it’s going to take a huge amount of time. It’s a good tool if you want output that is “good enough” for many practical purposes without direct human input, but it is especially difficult to do anything special-cased for a particular spread (moving images, text boxes, diagrams, ... exactly where you want them). LaTeX is great for things like auto-generated documentation, long structured outlines, legal documents, or math papers full of complicated formulas. LaTeX is abysmally ineffective for posters, magazines, or the like. I find that for the vast majority of content in between those extremes (e.g. college humanities homework, non-technical journals, resumés, menus, coffee-table books, novels, poetry, personal letters, ...), InDesign ends up giving nicer output with less headaches.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    In my field there are always templates. LaTeX, or I guess TeX, works well until it doesn’t, and then fails in ugly ways (quite the opposite of Word, which will work all the time not very well). So overflow and underflow paragraphs are possible, so are orphans, though it tries to avoid them if the output is decent. This is nice because I can fix all my problems usually by refining my content (changing words, orders, etc...), I don’t actually have to dig deep into TeX to otherwise modify the format! This is quite usable in general, though there are huge debates on whether it is appropriate. From what I can tell, Adobe follows the more technical approach, though I’ve only looked over my wife’s shoulder. The fact that I’m just producing PDFs with LaTeX is also different. If I’m writing a web essay, I don’t mind using straight HTML/CSS, even markdown doesn’t really convey many benefits for me.
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      Web essays is definitely not the place to use professional typesetting tools. Browsers are simply incapable of doing professional quality typesetting of the type books have had since the 15th century because the output environment is too heterogeneous, unless you abandon html and render documents as SVG or PDF or something (I would not recommend doing that). Authoring tools won’t help you. On the web the best you can do is make (or purchase/find) a decent CSS template and hope it’s readable enough for most viewers on most devices.
      - ryandrake 9y ago
        I've always been curious: Pretend I'm totally ignorant, and have no idea what need a typesetting tool fulfills. Someone who has used and been happy with Word / Open Office for years to write documents. What does LaTeX/InDesign solve for me, besides "nice looking math" that I'm not getting out of basic word processors? How do I know which one I need? I honestly have no clue. If I were to start writing a book tomorrow, I'd just open Word. Why not? What am I getting when I invest either the time to learn LaTeX or the money to buy InDesign?
        9y ago
geofft 9y ago
One practical advantage of using free tools is that everyone in your company can use it, you can write automation that uses it, etc. I'm not going to defend LaTeX in particular, but there's a lot of value into using something (like Markdown or reStructuredText or whatever) that anyone in your company can propose edits to, where you can automatically publish nicely-formatted (e.g. HTML) documentation when anyone in your company makes a change, and so forth. Another way of gaining this advantage is to use something you're already paying for like an internal wiki.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  I’m not recommending anyone use InDesign or similar tools for everything. It’s a typesetting tool designed for producing paper documents. You should use it for your company’s magazine, menu, posters, and published books, not for your auto-generated technical documentation, your blog posts, or your internal emails. The previous commenter wrote about what to do if you “don't want to spend a few $10k on professional typesetting software.” That’s much steeper than most people will spend on professional typesetting software.

nobleach 9y ago

I used to do all my docs in Adobe Framemaker. The output was amazing. The software itself felt a little obtuse, but seeing the printed pages was great.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

Fair enough. My wife uses Adobe tools for typesetting, she is a professional (she pays $100/month for her CS subscription, however). I'm not a professional, I've looked at the amount of effort needed to refine output in these tools and they make LaTeX look usable...

jacobolus 9y ago
I find that in most cases InDesign takes an order of magnitude less time/effort and dramatically less frustration to get a particular careful output than MS Word, LaTeX, or other commonly available tools. Your wife probably has difficult requirements and exacting quality standards, and could likely get output with quality equivalent to common documents prepared using amateur/automatic tools in a much shorter time, if she wanted to. It’s almost impossible to do professional quality typesetting in MS Word. Last time I really tried was about 10 years ago. I spent like 4 hours trying and failing to fix basic typographic mistakes in another person’s 20-page document, and then gave up and did the whole thing over in InDesign in 20 minutes, with great results. In LaTeX, you can theoretically do anything you want but unless there’s already a template for it (or you have numerous or long documents targeting the same output style, for which you want to make a template and then mostly rely on automatic layout), it’s going to take a huge amount of time. It’s a good tool if you want output that is “good enough” for many practical purposes without direct human input, but it is especially difficult to do anything special-cased for a particular spread (moving images, text boxes, diagrams, ... exactly where you want them). LaTeX is great for things like auto-generated documentation, long structured outlines, legal documents, or math papers full of complicated formulas. LaTeX is abysmally ineffective for posters, magazines, or the like. I find that for the vast majority of content in between those extremes (e.g. college humanities homework, non-technical journals, resumés, menus, coffee-table books, novels, poetry, personal letters, ...), InDesign ends up giving nicer output with less headaches.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  In my field there are always templates. LaTeX, or I guess TeX, works well until it doesn’t, and then fails in ugly ways (quite the opposite of Word, which will work all the time not very well). So overflow and underflow paragraphs are possible, so are orphans, though it tries to avoid them if the output is decent. This is nice because I can fix all my problems usually by refining my content (changing words, orders, etc...), I don’t actually have to dig deep into TeX to otherwise modify the format! This is quite usable in general, though there are huge debates on whether it is appropriate. From what I can tell, Adobe follows the more technical approach, though I’ve only looked over my wife’s shoulder. The fact that I’m just producing PDFs with LaTeX is also different. If I’m writing a web essay, I don’t mind using straight HTML/CSS, even markdown doesn’t really convey many benefits for me.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    Web essays is definitely not the place to use professional typesetting tools. Browsers are simply incapable of doing professional quality typesetting of the type books have had since the 15th century because the output environment is too heterogeneous, unless you abandon html and render documents as SVG or PDF or something (I would not recommend doing that). Authoring tools won’t help you. On the web the best you can do is make (or purchase/find) a decent CSS template and hope it’s readable enough for most viewers on most devices.
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      I've always been curious: Pretend I'm totally ignorant, and have no idea what need a typesetting tool fulfills. Someone who has used and been happy with Word / Open Office for years to write documents. What does LaTeX/InDesign solve for me, besides "nice looking math" that I'm not getting out of basic word processors? How do I know which one I need? I honestly have no clue. If I were to start writing a book tomorrow, I'd just open Word. Why not? What am I getting when I invest either the time to learn LaTeX or the money to buy InDesign?
      - 9y ago

geofft 9y ago

One practical advantage of using free tools is that everyone in your company can use it, you can write automation that uses it, etc. I'm not going to defend LaTeX in particular, but there's a lot of value into using something (like Markdown or reStructuredText or whatever) that anyone in your company can propose edits to, where you can automatically publish nicely-formatted (e.g. HTML) documentation when anyone in your company makes a change, and so forth. Another way of gaining this advantage is to use something you're already paying for like an internal wiki.

jacobolus 9y ago
I’m not recommending anyone use InDesign or similar tools for everything. It’s a typesetting tool designed for producing paper documents. You should use it for your company’s magazine, menu, posters, and published books, not for your auto-generated technical documentation, your blog posts, or your internal emails. The previous commenter wrote about what to do if you “don't want to spend a few $10k on professional typesetting software.” That’s much steeper than most people will spend on professional typesetting software.