History of Adobe InDesign
From PageMaker Pro to "Quark Killer" - the story of how a small project became the desktop publishing industry standard.
During the 1990s parallel development was being done in Seattle for a replacement for Aldus PageMaker. Initially it was going to be named PageMaker Pro, but during development it had the code name K2 and internally within Aldus it also had the nickname "Quark Killer". The main competitor and standard in the desktop publishing arena was Quark Express (hence the nickname). The team working on this project was quite small and PageMaker was still the main product in development.
In the mid-90s Adobe and Aldus merged and one of the main new developments in PageMaker 6 followed by PageMaker 6.5 was the integration between PageMaker and Adobe Acrobat which had just been released with the Export PDF feature.
Below is a table outlining the successive releases of Adobe InDesign and some of the main features for each release. The idea over all of this time was to have a product that mainly comprised of plug-ins with a relatively small executable. InDesign and InCopy are basically the same base product but with a different set of plug-ins as are InDesign Server and the desktop version of InDesign.
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