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Our Greatest Fear Realized: Word vs. InDesign
January 9, 2008

I remember years ago, sitting down with Tim Gill (Quark founder) and John Warnock (Adobe founder) at separate times and talking to them about their greatest fears in the very competitive page layout market. What was surprising was that both visionaries did not discuss the leap frogging of feature sets that was occurring between PageMaker and XPress. Instead they both said that one day Microsoft Word would add more page layout features and become their greatest competition.

Well as you may know that day may be upon us. Next week Microsoft will release Macintosh Office 2008 at Macworld. Why is this my greatest fear and why will this make service providers break out into a cold, clammy sweat?

Because in every version of Word since version one the greatest problems for service providers is

that pictures and text “wrapping” jump around like Mexican Jumping beans
features such as font choices (bold, italic, emboss, engrave, etc.)
picture box fill effects (gradients, textures, patterns)
and of course everyone’s favorite transparency feature

- usually don’t print right.

Oh, and by the way, lets not forget that every Office product ever created was designed to work in a RGB color space which makes creation four color separations a significant issue. If you're like me you keep wondering “Where is that make separations button”? And now they are going to add more page layout features and most likely promote those features to end years! My question to you: “Are you sweating yet?

Posted by Howie Fenton on January 9, 2008 | Comments (1)

January 28, 2008
In response to: Our Greatest Fear Realized: Word vs. InDesign
David Schwalje commented:

We keep the cheap stuff clients send in that they did themselves using Microsofts software such as Word / Publisher /etc.. we keep it in RGB and we output it digitally... pretty much what they would get if they output it themselves or at a walk up Kinkos. Then we (without making it a big deal) tell them a few things for next time. Such as design, photography, total true costs including postage, database work, etc. For best results, we prefer to design what we print on the "real presses" and so while we take in crap done in Microsoft we at the same time invest in our customers to help them out on their next project by having us do the design work.