Reply To: Should we start an Adobe Customers pressure group?

My $0.02:

I’ve been an Adobe InDesign user since its release. I wasn’t always a fan, but was finally converted by CS2. Compared to other programs such as Quark Xpress, Scribus or Pagemaker, I know what application I would rather use.

That said, I am frustrated and bemused at the lack of improvements or innovations that were introduced to InDesign in the revisions in the past few years that address what I would like to see as a prepress operator and graphic designer primarily in the print medium. There have been improvements to produce content for on-screen media (whether publish online, HTML5 or epub) but features other users have been requesting for years on end, such as an improved footnotes and endnotes feature, are still yet to be adopted.

I was present at PEPCON 2015 where the Adobe InDesign team had an open Q&A with the attendees, and can tell readers who weren’t at the session that the people that need to hear our concerns have certainly heard them. There will be another chance in Denver in November 2015 during the InDesign Conference.

Given that PEPCON 2015 was three months ago (at the time of writing this post) I don’t expect our wishes and requests to be implemented immediately in the next release. Knowing that our requests have been heard, taken seriously, and perhaps working towards implementation would certainly be a step in the right direction.

Eugene’s suggestion in his first post in this thread does already exist, and it is the bug report/wishform page: https://www.adobe.com/products/wishform.html . As someone who has filed many reports and requests, it is easy to feel as if the reports lob straight into a trash-can… until they are dealt with and answered. I’d filed a bug report (among others) concerning the delete function not working correctly in the last release… and in this release it is fixed.

It is important for Adobe to be reminded why InDesign became the success that it was over Quark Xpress, and that was because it was a better product with innovations that had been ignored or disregarded by its competitor. I believe that to remain as the better product, it has to constantly innovate, improve and be better than not only its historical competitors, but new ones as well (e.g. Affinity Publisher).