InDesign

My writing experience is primarily online and freelance work. It seems like almost every newspaper job post requires knowledge of InDesign.

Is there a specific version that you should know? Has anyone signed up for the per month plan on Adobe.com?

 

If you've ever worked with QuarkXPress, the transition to InDesign is not that difficult. I pretty much taught myself all I needed to know by simply using what I knew about Quark and experimenting. Not an expert, but I could do enough to get a no frills job done.

Hey, if I can learn it, anyone can.

 

That's good to know. We're supposed to complete our transition to InDesign by the end of the month. It also gets us off these 8-year old Apples, all of which are about to kick the bucket, onto new Apples which might actually be able to run longer than 15 minutes without crashing.

 

I took a job a couple months ago that took me from six years of using Quark into one using exclusively InDesign. I spent a week training with the person I was replacing (who was retiring) where I essentially just made a mental checklist of where everything I would need was and, on the first real hands-on day, looked like I'd been on the program for years.
It's a breeze and works really well if your chain has some kind of content management system that syncs with it. At the place I'm at, we use BLOX and apart from the occasional bug, it's great.
The best part is that when the pages do crash, and yes it still happens, you rarely lose much if anything. So much better than Quark.

 

I switched to Indesign a couple of stops ago.

I echo the sentiments in that it isn't difficult to transition from Quark. However, it would be a pain in the ass to try to work with both at the same time. Some of the commands are in different places.

That said, I have worked with newer versions, but the cheapskates at my current stop basically have the beta version. It sucks. There are more bugs than a discount travel lodge. It's a pain in the ass. It gets even worse when you try to use Indesign and Photoshop, or Indesign and the Internet, at the same time. But that's a rant against the cheapskates here.

 

InDesign is great.

 

Been a few years, but it was an easy transition from Quark to InDesign.

 

I'll add to the pile. I actually enjoyed using Quark, but InDesign was a very easy transition -- and a much more powerful program if you've got entire Adobe creative suite integrated.

 

I made the transition to InDesign a year ago after previously using Quark. Aside from forgetting that certain Quark commands didn't work in InDesign, transition wasn't too bad.
As for the OP, do you have any layout experience at all? If not, it probably wouldn't hurt to try the free month-long trial. It probably also wouldn't hurt to search the interwebs (and Youtube) for how-to stories and videos.

 

InDesign is more user friendly and is more logical than Quark. The transition from Quark to InDesign is easy to make and you can do so much more with InDesign.

 

We did the same Quark to InDesign last summer...it was a smooth transition...of course we held a company-wide workshop among the sports writers with the tech crew to get introduced to it. That helped a lot, but it's been smooth, and now I prefer InDesign slightly, although the programs are very similar

 

Doing a trial of InDesign does really depend on how much design experience you have.
Almost everyone here has told you how the transition is from Quark, and that's great if you've used Quark, but reading the original post, it doesn't look like you have.
One thing you might do first is download a freeware design program (even Microsoft Publisher, as bad as it is will do if it's on your computer) just to familiarize yourself with the basics of creating picture boxes, text boxes, and simple pages and designs. Then perhaps do the InDesign trial, though I imagine neither will give you the real world experience most jobs want you to have.