InDesign Backwards Compatibility in CS5 an MAJOR issue

This has been a most interesting and heated discussion and it is certainly not the first time that the issue of backsaving InDesign documents has come up. It has been an issue from the earliest InDesign versions to the present. Although I am not directly part of the InDesign organization, but I am both a computer scientist and an Adobe employee, I'd like to give some perspective to this issue:

As some contributors to this thread has indicated, there are major technical difficulties in terms of backsaving when using features that don't exist in the previous version. Examples:

• Use of the multiple page size feature of InDesign 7. What exactly should be done when backsaving to any previous version of InDesign, none of which support multiple page sizes? Convert the document into a book with multiple InDesign documents? And what if it is already part of a book? And what happens to existing internal relationships? And if you then re-open the document in InDesign 7, don't expect a single document with multiple page sizes.

• Use of the column-spanning paragraph attribute of InDesign 7. How do you deconstruct a layout that uses this feature? Yes, it can be done but you might not like the results in terms of a hodge-podge of text frames that don't lend themselves to nice, clean text reflow. And again, such deconstructed content won't automatically go back to column-spanning paragraphs if opened in InDesign 7.

• And if you think this is difficult, supporting multiple versions of backsaving is even more difficult because you may very well end up having to do multiple levels of content/formatting deconstruction to match the capabilities of a much earlier release.

In fact, this is not really a matter of whether backsaving could be implemented technically – some form of backsaving could conceivably be done going all the way back to InDesign 1.0, but rather issues of (1) what compromises would need to be made in the resultant backsaved documents (per examples above) and to what degree users would find such necessary compromises acceptable in real world use – you would not be able to losslessly “round trip” an InDesign document to an earlier version and back, (2) the cost in terms of development time and engineering resource to spec out how backsaving would work, implementation of such a specification, and extensively testing such an implementation with a wide range of graphically complex documents, and (3) the tradeoffs of (1) and (2) versus new features requested by our user base. In other words, backsaving is “doable” but it is exceptionally expensive and time-consuming to implement and even then would yield marginal benefits.

Prior to the implementation phase of each release of InDesign, members of the InDesign organization do consult with major users of the product querying as to their requirements in terms of features as well as a ranking of Adobe-proposed new features. For better or for worse, the major users of InDesign have never made a backsaving feature a real priority for Adobe. If this was an identified big issue for these customers and they were willing to accept the lack of lossless round-tripping, you would have seen support for backsaving (beyond one version and natively, not .inx) implemented.

Contrary to what some of you may think, there is no “conspiracy” here to force upgrades by not providing full backsave functionality, but rather, a honest effort to try to meet the customer-identified most important and reliably-implementable features.

          - Dov