InDesign User Group

There's a cool thing locally. An employee at the Portland Mac Store organized a chapter of the InDesign User Group, and I got to go.

It's free. Chance to win prizes and all that stuff. Had a very nice lady from Adobe give us some more info on IDCS (which you should really be upgrading to if you haven't).

While I don't remember too many particulars (I was too busy trying to record details on my fellow attendees, get a feel for the group) I do remember one reaction I had overall. As things were being gone over I compared them with what I knew about QuarkXPress (lets face it, IDCS is still positioned as the antiQuark). Now, I'm no Certified Expert in QXP, but everything that IDCS did was just beyond QXP by light-years - just everything. Were it only for the native file use (you drop things from Photoshop into IDCS without converting to TIFF -just drag and drop - that would be cool, just that.

But IDCS respects transparency. That means no clipping paths!

IDCS handles tables better.

The Print dialog is less obfuscated.

Get to Adobe.com and get a demo. Just do this thing.

And I didn't win anything in the raffle, but I did get a free CD with two converting-from-QXP video workshops. One was with the ever-fabulous Deke McClelland, and the other was with the former "Mr QuarkXPress", David Blatner.

It all reminded me how much better than sliced bread IDCS and the whole CS is.