Adobe Systems Inc has now begun US and international English-language shipments of InDesign 1.0, its new page-layout application, originally known as K2 or Quark-killer. InDesign is built on object-oriented foundations that enables third party developers and systems integrators to deliver custom additions for vertical markets in the form of plug-ins. Nine such additions are shipping immediately.
Aimed at graphic designers, production artists, and pre press professionals, InDesign includes extensive text and layout handling, imaging, type support, printing, and color management support, and has been tightly integrated with other Adobe products such as Illustrator Photoshop, Acrobat and PressReady.
InDesign runs on Mac OS 8.5 or later, Windows 98 and NT. Estimated street price is $700 for both platforms, with volume discounts available. French and German version will ship within two weeks and other languages throughout the month. Existing Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker and QuarkXPress users can currently buy it for $300, until the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Quark Inc announced its expected alliance with Vignette at the Seybold conference in San Francisco yesterday. QuarkXpress and Vignette’s StoryServer 4 are to be seamlessly integrated to form a professional print-to-web publishing system. Quark said the integration would enable nearly instant deployment of QuarkXpress content on the web.
The integration has been achieved partly through the use of new extensions to Xpress called avenue.quark enabling customers to tag QuarkXpress content and extract it in XML format. Vignette uses the extensions to post rich content directly into the StoryServer production workflow system. Quark said it would also support the ICE Information and Content Exchange protocol proposed as a standard by Vignette last year, and supported by various other publishing companies, including Adobe. Production software is expected early next year. Quark brings to Vignette an installed base of around 2 million publishing customers worldwide.
Worldweb.net, based in Alexandria, Virginia, also plans to link its Expressroom 6.0 content management and web publishing system directly up to QuarkXpress for real-time web publishing. The company said the extension was scheduled for release in the fourth quarter.
