Writing Tools – Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign probably shouldn’t be thought of as a writing tool, but for some of us who self-publish it’s very much a tool for writers. InDesign provides facilities for very powerful and flexible publication development in many areas, certainly far beyond books and stories. But in the context of writing per se, it’s a tool that I find indispensable when a manuscript is more than 90% edited and ready to start looking like a book. Available for Windows and MacOS.

But my approach to writing and finalizing a piece is unconventional. Most writers prefer (or are required) to leave the design and formatting of their work to designers. And many writers aren’t fond of writing on a computer at all, whatever the tool. Certainly InDesign is not for most writers, and for those with occasional design needs, there are many other tools that are simpler and easier to learn.

In my case, even if I don’t plan to produce the final design & typesetting of a publication, I still find it useful to view the document as if it were finished and published. There’s nothing quite like reading your carefully crafted opus in a polished PDF that looks like it was printed. Suddenly all manner of gaffs and misteaks come to light.

InDesign occupies a strange region that embraces graphic design, high-end typesetting and compositing, presentation design, document development, and publishing, along with several other less obvious areas. InDesign is extremely powerful, and has eclipsed Quark Express for most text layout among professionals. It has been evolving rapidly in recent years, with new features for “responsive design” (documents that can adapt to full-size displays, tablets, and phones) and interactive features that digital users have come to expect. At the same time, it’s entirely appropriate for building books, magazines, catalogs, and the like. Some very specialized third-party publication systems use InDesign (and its little sister InCopy) to manage complex mass periodicals. Many of the slick, interactive e-Magazines now appearing on tablets are developed InDesign. It is also widely used to produce less flashy eBook editions for Kindle e-ink readers and Kindle apps.

At the same time, InDesign contains a substantial set of graphic tools that are likely to be needed while designing a document for publication. Some experts claim that InDesign is as powerful as Adobe Illustrator for general graphics work. In fact, the overlap with Illustrator is significant, although most shared capabilities are implemented slightly differently. I don’t find these two Adobe tools to be interchangeable for design, and when the design requirements get “interesting,” I go to Illustrator first.

How does one differentiate InDesign from other writing and design tools?

First, InDesign is not intended for writing. You can certainly write “inside” an InDesign document, or use InCopy to develop content for a document being built by someone else with InDesign. You can open InDesign’s “story editor” to work with plain, unadorned text, thereby avoiding having to interact with text frames, threading, page layouts, and the like. But trying to write something even as graphically simple as a novel would be needlessly cumbersome. I’ve done it, because I really like InDesign, and I know it fairly deeply. But I don’t write new material — instead I write mostly in Scrivener and then import clean RTF (Rich Text Format) into InDesign to prepare the printed book. Once there, limited editing and reorganization is possible, but ideally a manuscript is finished before attacking it with InDesign.

It’s also possible to export from InDesign into Kindle format using Amazon’s Kindle plugin (which, in recent years, has become relatively trouble-free for simple books). But eBooks are a strange world of their own, and conversion to a full-featured eBook is not fully automatic, and almost always involves some technical tweaking.

Second, InDesign is a complex, professional document development powerhouse — it’s really not well suited for the faint of heart, or for the weekend designer. But if you’re seriously planning on making a full-blown publication, with high quality typesetting and refined graphical aesthetics, InDesign is very much the tool of choice.

I’ve said before that it’s important to separate writing from designing, and I find the combination of Scrivener and InDesign to be a rather excellent model of that separation. But I should add that self-publishing doesn’t have to involve wearing every hat in the publishing company. A good designer, even a non-professional, might produce significantly better results in InDesign than a good writer without much design experience could do.