Notes on InDesign 2 as compared to FrameMaker 7

User Interface Features

Notes on items that are primarily differences in the user interface, without significant difference in the underlying function (except as noted).

Design Features

Notes on functional items that most affect the designer of the book or document.

FrameMaker Annoyances Solved

1. 1. [Text frames have built-in "inset" properties, specifying Top, Bottom, Left and Right distances by which text is inset from the boundary of the frame.] Longtime FM feature request and FAQ ("How come Space Above doesn't work in the first paragraph in a frame?")
2. 2. [Multiple Undos. Just keep hitting cmd-z to back out a long sequence of changes. (But no History palette ala PS.)] Long, long-standing FM feature request.
3. 3. [Drop cap is a built-in feature of Paragraph Style definition: can specify one or more initial letters are to be set as drops; also specify number of lines of depth (which can be negative to make a flag-cap).] No more manual drop-caps-in-anchored-frames.
4. 4. [Master pages can be defined in heirarchical relationships, so a slightly different MP can be created "based on" another. Inheritance relations are visible in pages palette. New MP easily created by tweaking a BP and dragging its icon into the MP section of the pages palette.] Your MP "Chapter Open" can be based on your "Left" and inherit most of its dimensions and guides; your MP "Index Open" can be based on "Chapter Open," and etc. Updates propogate down the chain.
5. 5. [Master/Body page access is not modal: master pages appear in same palette as body pages, brought to view for editing by double-click. BPs reflect changes instantly.] Maybe you prefer to type esc-v-M and esc-v-B?
6. 6. [Can have multiple views of a document, e.g. zoomed in on one window, view whole double-page spread in another.] Long-desired FM feature, where only one view of a given document is possible.
7. 7. [The Book palette specifies a "style source document," one component whose Styles and Swatches override all others in the book. Choice can be changed anytime. Override applied by Synchronize command.] This eliminates the FM annoyance of having to put master style def's into the first file of the book (typically the title page doc,which doesn't need any of the master styles).Also, having Synchronize as a separate command eliminates surprises of "inconsistent definitions" discovered half-way printing a book.
8. 8. [The Book palette shows not only the names of the book components but their current status: available, modified, in-use by other user, or missing.] Eliminates having FM report "cannot open" a chapter when it is halfway through printing a book.
9. 9. [Pagination sequence can be reset or changed in format at a section boundary within a document.] Eliminates restriction that pagination can only change between chapters; makes it possible to define a whole (small) book in one document.
10. 10. [Can easily open a display of all glyphs in the current font, including "Pro" ligatures, small caps etc.; insert a selected one by clicking.] Eliminates having to look up the ctrl-Q sequence for special characters, which in any case don't give access to swashes, ligatures, other OpenType features.
11. 11. [ID retains the link to all placed objects (copied or not), displays them in a Links palette, allows selective or batch updating of imported graphics from linked files. Can sort list of imports by filename or by page of use.] Eliminates having to "generate" a special list to document all imports so you could check their status manually. Reduces chance of discovering a graphic has become a gray square without warning.
12. 12. [Graphical UI for connecting text flow between frames. Can have text flow links display as pretty blue lines.]. Eliminates the arcane procedure of first selecting two text frames, then Format > Customize Layout > Connect Text Frames. Also makes it easy to find mistakes in text frame linking in complicated layouts.
13. 13. [Fit Content to Frame (scale content to fill frame) and Fit Frame to Content (like FM "shrinkwrap") are menu commands.]. Eliminates manual resizing of frame boundaries using Graphics > Object Properties.
14. 14. [Format of TOC entries is specified in a reasonably clear dialog (after needed para styles have been defined).] No futzing with arcane definitions on the reference pages.
15. 15. [TOC can be generated from whole book or from selected documents. TOC is placed exactly like an imported text stream, by clicking into a text frame.] Long standing FM feature request: no more faking chapter TOCs via xrefs.
16. 16. [Type>Find Font is a specialized find/change for font uses.] Remember all the times FM told you "missing font" but you couldn't find where the heck it was used?
17. 17. [Language (for spell check and hyphenation) is a character-level attribute, not a paragraph level attribute. Can be specified in a named Character Style.] Long-standing FM feature request, where language is a paragraph attribute so there is no way to designate, eg, an italicized botanical name as non-English for spellcheck.
18. 18. [The Baseline Grid, with dimensions specified separately from the graphics alignment grid, is used to space text baselines consistently throughout the document and to align them across multiple columns.] Long standing FM feature request, the ability to synchronize baselines across multiple columns.
19. 19. [There is a command "find unused styles."] Old FM problem: which of the styles in the Para or Char catalog are not used and can be deleted? (Or ought to be in use but aren't?)
20. 20. [The Tabs palette for setting tabs is a floating palette that when opened aligns itself to the boundary of the current text frame.]. This makes it a lot easier to position tab icons than using FM's document ruler.
21. 21. [The UI for specifying a rule above/below a Para style lets you specify weight, color, indent in the Para Style dialog. Rules automatically crop at text frame boundary.] No more flipping back and forth between the document and the Reference page, trying to get a rule cropped just so. (No more Reference pages!)
22. 22. [Interface for defining Index entries is both simpler and more complicated than FM's Index palette. In a classic TUI vs. GUI face-off, ID uses a set of palettes, commands and dialogs to achieve much the same function as FM's arcane index term syntax.] There is one important advantage to the ID method: you specify page ranges at the time you make the initial entry, from a popup with choices like "to end of section," "for <n> more paragraphs," etc. This eliminates the FM annoyance of having to type <$startrange> and then remembering to put in a matching <$endrange>, or often, forgetting to.

InDesign Shortcomings

The features of InDesign that improve on Frame are mostly corrections of "annoyances" as described in the preceding section. The items in this section are "shortcomings" in that they are important, widely-used FM functions that simply have no equivalent in ID.

Until these lacks are supplied in ID, there is no reasonable hope of converting an existing base of FM documents to ID. However, the excellence of the existing ID feature set hints that, if and when ID ever does address these shortcomings, it will do them in clever ways.

Note: None of the following are corrected in the new InDesign CS product released in October, 2003.

1. 1. ID has no autonumber facility: hence, it cannot support automatic bullet (or other glyph) lists, or numbered lists, or numbered headings and subheads ( very common in industrial documentation), no table or figure captions numbered automatically based on chapter number.
2. 2. ID has no facility comparable to FM cross-references. (It is possible to give a page-number reference that is dynamically filled in, but the reference is only to a text frame where the current story continues, not to a paragraph or a sentence.) Not only can you not place page-number references to arbitrary text, you can't pick up paragraph text for re-use from,e.g., a glossary. The only way to quote text from elsewhere in the document is to copy and paste.
3. 3. ID has no facility comparable to FM user variables. No way to incorporate boilerplate text that can be globally changed later, or by importing a different style document. (Not all such uses can be replaced by global find/replace.)
4. 4. ID has no facility comparable to FM conditional text. Flawed as it is, conditional text is widely used and where it is used, is integral to the document design. There would be no substitute except to replace the FM document with <n> ID documents, one for each conditional variation.
5. 5. The ID "Inline frame" is equivalent of an anchored frame positioned "below current line" with a baseline offset. There does not seem to be an equivalent of an anchored frame with any other positioning attribute, for example, "at top of column," "at end of column," outside column on binding edge, etc. Maybe I missed it but I don't think there is any way to anchor a graphic beside text and have it move with the text in editing.
6. 6. ID has no support for mathematical expressions or equations. It may well be that its elaborate typographical controls permit equally nice output to FM's Equation support, but certainly achieving it will require more hand-labor.
7. 7. ID does not completely implement the FM concept of "As Is" as a style value, so that you can create a character style that applies only the italic attribute, or only a different point size, but leaves all other font features unchanged. Some features in the Character Style definition dialog allow a "not specified" setting, but font family and size are always changed. This makes it impossible, for example, to have a character style "Signal Name" that works equally well in both 12-pt Garamond body text and 9-pt Helvetica figure call-outs.
8. 8. ID has no facility comparable to the FM "global update options" in the Paragraph and Character Designers. That is, there is no simple way to change the font family, or the hyphenation rule, of all paragraph styles simultaneously. To change the document font entirely, edit every Style definition. (But see next item)
9. 9. When a para or char style definition is updated, paras having that style are not automatically updated to use the new style. Instead, when you select one of them, a plus sign appears in the style palette showing that the selected text has a modified version of the style. If there's a global way to enforce an updated style, I don't know what it is. (For a book, the Book palette command Synchronize? But in a document?)
10. 10. You can't paste plain text, when the source of the copied text was styled. For example if you copy text from a browser window, or from a user-supplied Word document, it will paste into ID retaining its styles, colors and font from the source. The editor then has to rationalize the formatting manually.