InDesign
Writing academic papers with many charts and graphs requiring explicit page control, Desktop publishing (DTP) to compete with and replace Quark XPress
It is professional desktop publishing software for users who need explicit, detailed control over page layout for print or digital documents.
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FIRST-HAND READS
What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.
“I've found the auto-generated output not up to the standard I was after. Worse, I've seen output differ between InDesign versions, which scared me.”
NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-05-27
“InDesign's EPUB output is horrifically terrible, especially if you're trying to use custom fonts/graphics for page headings. (Basically - no.) And the CSS is... really not great.”
NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-26
“used InDesign to write my MBA papers cause I had lots of charts and graphs and wanted explicit control of the page”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-03-08
“Sadly InDesign is now a joke. Six years ago I had to use it for something simple like exporting 500 letter template instances to a single PDF for printing (where each letter gets the address/addressee replaced). It couldn't do it. It would crash every time.”
NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-03-07
“il testo di 30pt appare visivamente più grande rispetto a Indesign dove appaiono più piccoli visivamente pur avendo la stessa dimensione”
NEGATIVE · performance · Reddit · 2025-05-09
“I love that we can drive content from InDesign to Express now”
MIXED · features · Reddit · 2025-05-08
“You can do layouts in Photoshop or Illustrator, but they should be done in InDesign.”
POSITIVE · features · Reddit · 2025-04-24
“Indesign, they've mostly left alone, which I'm happy about because it's like Oreos. Stop fucking with the recipe, you made the perfect cookie.”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-04-11
“The code outputted is absolutely terrible, as one used to get creating webpages with WYSIWYG Dreamweaver et al. and causes a lot of issues that have to be fiddled with in InDesign, manually corrected in the unzipped export, or frequently just left in the final book”
NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2024-11-05
“InDesign doesn't make it easy to track how much of this you're doing correctly or flag which parts you've done wrong”
NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2024-08-25
“the InDesign integration was esp. nice (even managed to write a script which could manage four-level deep indexes which was said to be impossible by Adobe's Scripting Evangelist)”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2024-08-10
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