Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing (DTP) software application produced by Adobe Systems.
InDesign was positioned as a high-end alternative and successor to Adobe's own PageMaker. InDesign's primary adopters are designers of periodical publications, posters, and other print media; longer documents still are designed with FrameMaker (manuals and technical documents) or with QuarkXPress (books, catalogs). The combination of a relational database, InDesign and Adobe InCopy word processor, which uses the same formatting engine as InDesign, is the heart of dozens of publishing systems for newspapers, magazines, and other publishing environments.
New versions of the software introduced new file formats. To support the vast array of new features (particularly typographic features) introduced with InDesign CS, both the program and its document format were not retro-compatible. Fortunately, InDesign CS2 introduced the retro-compatible InDesign Interchange (.inx) format, an XML-based representation of the document. Versions of InDesign CS updated with the 3.01 April 2005 update (available free on Adobe's Web site) can read files saved from InDesign CS2 exported to this format. The InDesign Interchange format does not support versions earlier than InDesign CS.
Currently InDesign does not seem to work correctly on Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), as Adobe states: "InDesign CS3 may unexpectedly quit when using the Place, Save, Save As or Export commands using either the OS or Adobe dialog boxes. Unfortunately, there are no workarounds for these known issues."