Re: InDesign

Re: InDesign

[Charles P. Schaum]

On Tue, 2008-05-27 at 08:24 +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:
> how do they deal with non compatible new features; for instance, at 
> bachotek i learned that some otf features that are not supported in 
> older versions are supported in new ones (or are supported
> differently); 
> is there some compatibility mode (i.e. is the old behavior still
> present 
> and the ID/IC version number stored in the document?)
> 

I asked those wiser than I and this is what professional expectations
tend to be:

1. Versioning within a document (track changes) basically becomes a
non-entity by production; that is local and removed within a production
cycle and tends to be wholly separated from version issues. Also,
product cycles are generally tagged to a version of a program and
therefore multiple versions need to be able to coexist in the case where
the new version may not be backward-compatible with the old.

With Quark, one could only count on backward compatibility over one
version bump. After that, compatibility would diminish so that Quark 4.0
would not open Quark 1.0 docs. Makes Microsoft's format versioning seem
positively user-friendly by comparison.

The firm I work for has only started with the current InDesign/CS3 suite
and relies on the quark plugin to do the work. Especially in Quark,
third-party plugins were the most fragile. We expect, however, that
Indesign will probably follow Quark in failing to be too
bacwardly-compatible, opening well only the prior version docs and then
saving them as current.

That's one of the things that drove my personal computing away from
Windows to Linux/FreeBSD. I was using an English firm's Creative Suite
knock-off product (Serif) and realized that their business plan called
for making shoddy products and substituting version bumps for bugfixes.
I can only bleed so much to sate someone's greed and I found OSS to be
far friendlier regarding version compatibility, bugfixes and robustness.

AFAIK no real pressure for a compatibility mode exists in the commercial
DTP sector.

senecadesign.com has good InCopy resources and archives.

Charles


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