Eugene, I apologize for not having read your earlier post… just did, and it is full of excellent ideas! Thank you, too, for your kind words about my work and the site. I'm sorry that my comment (about your later post) was overly sharp, but I do feel that you (and some other here) are being pretty harsh to the InDesign team. I don't mean to be an apologist for them, and I want to keep the pressure on them, too! But I don't think it's fair to lambast them for how they make decisions or the features they choose to work on. Some of the features you list (from back in CS5) were extremely powerful. For example, what they were calling "soft-bottom frames" back then is now called "Auto-Size" (in the Text Frame Options dialog box). We all want more (I personally have a list several pages long of features I want in InDesign, many of which I've been asking about for literally 15 years). But I don't think it's true to say we haven't seen anything important recently. True, the first 3 or 4 years of CC was pretty sparse. And true, there has been nothing truly groundbreaking. But there have been some great new features. James Wamser maintains a wonderful document showing all the new features, per version: https://indesignsecrets.com/indesign-new-features-guide-updated-for-cc-2019.php From that, I see: Publish Online, CC Libraries, Paragraph Shading and Borders, end notes, object style size/position, pdf comment import… By the way, I think there are five reasons why it seems like there hasn't been a lot of change in InDesign: There was a surprisingly large amount of work done on under-the-hood changes and user interface changes over the past 6 years. Some of that was necessary and some was self-inflicted (such as Adobe kept changing the UI and InDesign had to "keep up"). There was a lot of turnover in product management, which was unfortunate but may have been inevitable as InDesign development was moved to their India office. It's been nice to see things "settling in" more, where there's more consistency and focus over the past year or two. This product needs long-term consistency and focus. The product is, of course, already reasonably mature. That means each year it becomes harder to "teach an old dog new tricks." I remember talking to Douglas Waterfall 8 or 9 years ago about a feature he was working on—I think footnotes. He started to explain the complexities, and I realized that a problem that I thought would be pretty simple ("just throw them at the bottom of the frame!") was actually mind-blowingly difficult to solve. He spent over 6 months just trying to crack the puzzle of how to architect this one change (which then took even more time to actually implement). The users/customers want more and more diverse things. (Bob wants them to do interactive features; Eugene wants print production and long doc improvements… the more users, the more directions the team is pulled. So the result is that we just get a little of this and a little of that. A lot of work has been done on background systems that aren't necessarily direct feature improvements in InDesign: publish online, creative cloud libraries, typekit/adobe fonts, adobe stock. While many of us might question the need to do these, we have to remember that ever since Creative Suite launched, InDesign has been part of a much larger ecosystem. Let's keep pushing for improvements to our favorite app! But I vote we keep it positive and constructive.
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