Response To "A QuarkXPress User's Review of Indesign CS"

A QuarkXPress user expresses frustrations with InDesign CS features--or lack thereof--and Quark VS InDesign eases the frustration.

Dear Dave Girard:

Correct, command-click (control+click on Windows) behaves dif­fer­ent­ly in InDesign than in Quark. In Quark, as you observe, command-click tem­porar­i­ly changes the cur­rent­ly select­ed tool into the Move tool, allow­ing you to drag objects around. And, as so frus­trat­ed you, command-clicking is a click-through option, allow­ing the object beneath the top­most to be select­ed modified.

InDesign has the same func­tion as Quark, that being chang­ing the cur­rent tool to the Selection tool (the black arrow). It’s just a mat­ter of timing.

With any tool select­ed, press the com­mand (con­trol on Windows) key to tem­porar­i­ly access the Move tool. While hold­ing com­mand, click on the object desired and start mov­ing. Clicking again will select the next object behind the desired one, so just command-click and drag once.

Don’t wor­ry about the backrub.

For those who have no idea what this is about, it is a response to Dave’s thor­ough review of InDesign CS from the per­spec­tive of a die-hard Quark user. In the review, Dave favor­ably com­pares the but­ter­fly to the lily, with only a few gripes–one being the command-click dif­fer­ences between them.

Dave decries a few oth­er things that I would like to take the oppor­tu­ni­ty to address.

Dave: InDesign cre­ates ugly temp files with names like “~my layoutt12~cawcaw106_.idlk” when you are work­ing on a doc­u­ment. There’s no option to keep them in a dif­fer­ent direc­to­ry and they can’t be hidden.

Pariah: Correct. There is indeed no option to keep them in a dif­fer­ent direc­to­ry, nor can they be hid­den (with­out an oper­at­ing sys­tem hack).

And, yes, they are ugly. But they instant­ly become beau­ti­ful the first time InDesign or the sys­tem crash­es before you have had a chance to hit save.

So what are these .IDLK files? They are tem­po­rary files that, between saves, con­tain bits of infor­ma­tion about what changed in open doc­u­ments since the last save. When the INDD doc­u­ment is closed, the cor­re­spond­ing IDLK temp file evaporates.

If InDesign clos­es abnor­mal­ly, how­ev­er, say with an unex­pect­ed­ly quit or because the pow­er blinks out, these ugly files will save your restore your files to the state they were in at the time of the crash. Simply re-open InDesign and the document(s) you had open are restored, in their expect­ed state, ready for sav­ing. Even doc­u­ments that had nev­er been saved are restored!

The beau­ty of IDLK files sud­den­ly rivals a sun­set over the Pacific.

Dave: Even if InDesign files are for­ti­fied with the finest of hard­ened leathers, it does­n’t pro­tect me from my own stupidity.

Pariah: Here Dave is talk­ing about InDesign’s lack of auto­mat­ic back­up or doc­u­ment revi­sion­ing, both fea­tures stan­dard (but turned off by default) in QuarkXPress.

InDesign’s file recov­ery data does not pro­tect you against hit­ting save, but oth­er fea­tures do. Specifically, Version Cue and mul­ti­ple undos.

With the full Creative Suite Premium, of which InDesign CS is a major part, comes the ver­sion­ing and back­up tech­nol­o­gy dubbed Version Cue. With VC enabled and con­fig­ured prop­er­ly, any InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, InCopy, or GoLive file can be auto­mat­i­cal­ly backed up and saved as dif­fer­ent revi­sions. If unwant­ed changes are com­mit­ted, restor­ing a pre­vi­ous ver­sion is a sim­ple process.

InDesign will undo even after a Save, some­thing Quark can­not, which is why Dave may have missed it. As long as the doc­u­ment has not been closed, InDesign will undo.

I have daz­zled many a cre­ative pro as, at the end of an intense InDesign train­ing class, they have watched me step back­ward through sev­en hours of InDesign demon­stra­tion and file con­struc­tion, all the way back to a plain white page.

Dave: The pages palette does­n’t auto scroll when you try and drag pages around.

Pariah: It does, you just have to posi­tion your cur­sor the right way. I often equate the Pages palette to a video game: It requires good hand-eye coor­di­na­tion to do any­thing with­out keep­ing one hand on command‑Z.

Dave: I’d like to see the abil­i­ty to change the default val­ue for line weights/strokes oth­er than 1 point.

Pariah: It’s in there. Close all doc­u­ments but leave InDesign open. Bring up the Stroke palette and set your new glob­al default stroke. Voila! Every new doc­u­ment you cre­ate will use this val­ue as the start­ing stroke value.

I agree with Dave on most of his oth­er points, and rather like his objec­tive­ly indepth review. Even more than a year lat­er, the arti­cle is an infor­ma­tive resource for Quark users on the fence. To see how it turned out, whether Dave made the switch or remained loy­al to his favorite work­horse, you will have to read “A QuarkXPress User’s Review of InDesign CS,” all 11 pages.