Newsletter publishing was never the same after the mid-'80s partnership of Adobe's Type 1 fonts and Aldus's groundbreaking PageMaker 2.0. Overnight, typesetting became an in-house activity.

The revolution continues with Adobe's recent introduction of InDesign 2.0 and Open Type fonts. This is important news since the visual presentation of ideas--and the ease with which attractive publications can be rapidly created--quickly translates into profits for newsletter publishers.

InDesign 2.0

InDesign 2.0 is not an "advanced" version of PageMaker. Rather, it's the result of a fresh, "from the ground up" approach to creating the perfect desktop publishing program. Adobe created an entirely separate research team, guided by extensive feedback from graphic designers and charged with the task of creating what the industry frequently refers to as a "Quark killer."

InDesign 2.0, both by itself and in partnership with Open Type fonts, offers significant enhancements which make it easier to create "craftsman-style" fonts. Numerous PageMaker frustrations have been eliminated. There are now multiple levels of undo and a much easier, palette-based access to commands and menus. PhotoShop and Illustrator users will be very comfortable with the new palette-based interface.

The big news to me is the ease with which it's possible to set noticeably better type. Hyphenation and justification now take place on a paragraph level (rather than on a whole document level), resulting in a more uniform right-hand rag There's also a single-click Optical Alignment feature that "hangs" punctuation marks outside the column margins.

Open Type

InDesign 2.0 is optimized to take advantage of Adobe's new Open Type format.. Open Type offers major quality and ease-of-use advantages over the previous Type 1 fonts:

* Single font file. A single font file contains all information necessary for printing and display, simplifying preparing files for commercial printers.

* Universal font format. Open Type fonts work equally well on both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms.

* Optical scaling. Open Type Pro fonts contain separate characters scaled for use at caption, body copy, subhead, and titling applications.

* Extended character sets. Type 1 fonts were limited to 256 glyphs (which could be uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, symbols, or ornaments). This required extensive typeface families, like Minion, to require numerous--sometimes over 30--separate files. Now all variations are contained in a single file.

Conclusion

Working with InDesign 2.0 and Open Type fonts is a joy. Things that used to be frustratingly difficult are now accomplished with the click of a mouse. Ligatures, for example, (which replace "bumping" letter combinations like ffi, as in office, with a single character) are automatically inserted, and they do not interfer with InDesign's spell checker. The most arcane typographic symbols and options--like Old Style Figures, True Small Caps, and ligatures--now just take seconds to apply (see illustrations previous page).

Adobe is offering significant savings for PageMaker users to upgrade to InDesign 2.0 and receive several Open Type fonts for free.

Visit Roger C. Parker's www.GmarketingDesign.com website and download o free illustrated tutorial illustrating many of InDesign 2.0's typesetting features.