Am 2008-05-30 um 14:31 schrieb Idris Samawi Hamid:
There is no denying that many advanced features in InDesign are missing in TeX(like) related software. What's more, the internationalization of InDesign is better.
Can you give a precise list of the features contained in InDesign that are missing in (lua)TeX or which TeX does not support well?
- much faster (i.e. I don't need to wait for several TeX runs e.g. if I need to check if some tweak fixed my page breaking) - optical (vs. metrical) kerning - a GUI ;-) and thus layout by "let's try how it looks" - layout definition (I struggle with ConTeXt's \setuplayout every time) - better page breaking constraints (you can define in your style sheets "keep n lines together" and "keep this together with the next paragraph) - PDF/X output - color profile conversions - image processing features like crop paths, feathered edges, drop shadow (in ConTeXt I need to prepare such in Photoshop in the right size - but I guess it would be possible to write a module that uses ImageMagick to achieve something similar) Problems in TeX *and* InDesign: - Unicode handling (composed and decomposed UTF-8 with or without BOM, UTF-16, different line endings) Working with InDesign as a developer I know that TeX's documentation is far better. Adobe's developer docs (e.g. on API, XML format, InDesign tagged text) are incomplete and errorneous. I don't think you can call the one or other "better" or "more advanced", it's just a different approach, and I choose the right tool for every project. (I.e. I only use TeX if I need the same content in different versions, if I can automate something or for books.) But the layout applications like InDesign (there's still also ugly old QuarkXPress, coming-of-age Scribus and some others) have learned a lot of the former domains of TeX, like registers and toc generation. There are still some areas where you need a programmable system, even trivia like chapter dependant running titles (in ConTeXt: headertexts). Greetlings from Lake Constance! Hraban --- http://www.fiee.net/texnique/ http://wiki.contextgarden.net https://www.cacert.org (I'm an assurer)