Frame vs Indesign vs alternatives??

[Alan Barber]

> so my boss wants to make sure we have all info
> to present.
> 
One important difference between InDesign and Frame has not been mentioned: InDesign takes typography seriously. If you're doing design for print, a large book in my case, this matters. Before CS4's introduction of cross-references (for end notes) InDesign was not a viable choice. 

Typography examples:

1. Frame scales down small caps, superscripts, and subscripts, even if the font contains carefully designed glyphs for these. They look cheesy. I couldn't find a way in Frame (v.8) to use the font glyphs without individually typing in code or copy-pasting from the Character Designer. InDesign lets you set a preference for which to use.

2. Same as 1 for ligatures. With InDesign you can automatically set every ligature the font contains, or only the common ones. Spell check continues to work even with ligatures displayed.

3. I'm yet to see InDesign set a footnote on the wrong page.

4. The hyphenation-justification engine for InDesign is more sophisticated than Frame's (and both are far superior to Word's) but the difference is too subtle for me to get excited about.

One more thing--I've never seen any angst among the user community for InDesign about Adobe's continuing commitment to the product.

Alan Barber