Newspaper production in ID

[DonWeaver]

I work for a major metro daily newspaper strongly leaning towards migrating from Quark to InDesign for all ad design / production. I am interesting in hearing info from anyone who's done the switch in a high volumn environment. How steep is the learning curve? Technical problems? Nightmare or dream? Thx.

 

[lvixen]

I work in Advertising for CVS/pharmacy. We just recently changed over from Quark to ID. The production staff was very nervous (obviously)of having to learn a new program while maintaining the insane production schedule. I was expecting a lot more grumbling and issues. It's gone rather smoothly and almost all of the people have fallen in love with ID. The staff had gone to class a couple of years ago when ID was in version 1 I believe. So needless to say, they didn't remember much if anything. They had no learning time, it was a case of "hit the ground running". We did not miss any deadlines, minimum overtime to adjust for the learning curve. My suggestion would be (which we found to be very helpful) to start people learning with translated documents from Quark. You can learn faster I think that way than staring at a blank page. We have found weirdness with runarounds from Quark. Seems to cause glitches in ID. Good Luck!

 

[tad1952]

I work for a service bureau / design house / large format printer. I started working with InDesign at the beta stage and absolutely adore it. I found that working with a "real" job was the best learning experience - the tutorials are great, but everyone has different needs. The learning curve was pretty quick - there is just a lot more things that InDesign will do but once you find out how, everything is pretty intuitive. We especially like the multi-user license and the fact that the program has so much built in - scaling, shadows, feathering, outlined editable text, convert all text to paths, etc etc. - so add-ons are a bonus, not a necessity.

I love how everything is right there! Tabs and style sheets, etc. can be accessed right from the palette - no constant mousing up to the menu bar, scrolling down, making a change, closing, etc etc.
If you are switching from Quark and don't want to learn new keyboard shortcuts, you can go to "Edit / Keyboard Shortcuts" and set it to "Shortcuts for Quark 4.0". InDesign shortcuts & tools very similar to Illustrator and Photoshop. You can import all your styles, including colour palettes, from another document which saves all sorts of time and aggravation. And pdfing is a breeze since Acrobat is built right in.

Now I only work in Quark if I absolutely have to.