Is there an Adobe InDesign for the Samsung A8 Teblet? If not, is there a compatible, suitable Sub?

[keithk49]

Just got a new Samsung A8 Tablet. I'm working to populate it with apps I work with on a regular basis.

InDesign is one, but I can't find the specific ADOBE In Design app. I had sauggestions for "Adobe Express:Graphic Design" and "InDesign: Graphic media by InDesign Media> Business" but NO Adobe ID.

I say a number of ID tutorials & techmanuals, etc., but no ID per se.

Is there a suitable sub that will be acceptable by Adobe? TYIA.

Reply: keithkillam@aol.com <Kj>

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

No. Just about the only (major) Creative Suite app for mobile is Photoshop, which (last time I looked) only ran on iPad.

Not sure I would want to try and wrangle ID on a tablet.

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[Conrad C]

InDesign is not available on any mobile platform.

Not all Creative Cloud applications are on mobile. Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, and Acrobat are available on mobile but many others are not. The mobile versions do not have all of the features of the desktop versions, and more are available on iOS than on Android.

InDesign is a page layout application, and there are not many on mobile. Apple Pages is one, but of course that does not run on Android. Affinity has Photo and Designer which on iPad can substitute for Photoshop and Illustrator, but their page layout app Publisher is not available on any mobile platform.

Right now, the only practical way to run InDesign on a tablet is to use a tablet PC that runs the desktop version of Microsoft Windows.

[keithk49]

Would that include Samsung A8, 10.5"diag?

[Geоrge]

There is no InDesign for Android.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

There are no Adobe apps for Android at all, except a very, very lightweight Photoshop.

(Mentioned already, just making it clearer.)

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[Willi Adelberger · Accepted solution]

InDesign is not available for the iPad, at least not yet.

Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Lightroom (not classic) are available.

[Geоrge]

Adobe was do something like compatible with ID - Adobe Comp, but this project was closed on this year. Yep, there is no ID for mobile (and I like this! This is not a soft for mobile devices). 

[rob day]

InDesign‘s linked images have to be on a local network or volume, so it seems unlikely that there will be an InDesign that will run on current mobile operating systems because the linked file paths can’t be missing for reliable PDF exports or print output.

[Conrad C]

That reason has been given before, but it might require more clarification, or an update, for today’s mobile OSs.

For example, I’ve used the iOS application Raw Power, which is a camera raw editor. It seems to take advantage of recent file system enhancements to iOS. It recently added a new option: Referenced Folders (linking to a specific file system location). As we know, referenced folders are critical for applications such as Lightroom Classic and InDesign, so I had to try it out.

Sure enough, Raw Power has the ability to reference external files in multiple specific folders on iOS. I tested both iPad internal storage, and external volumes mounted through the iPad USB-C port. It all works. Raw Power can maintain those file paths, even on unmounted external volumes. That’s why the folder icons below show broken links, the volumes are not currently mounted. But if I reconnect those external volumes to my iPad, those links will be restored. That behavior is no different than InDesign on macOS and Windows.

If Raw Power is using standard current iOS APIs, the next question is: What’s really holding back InDesign for iOS if it allows features such as referenced folder links and Adobe Fonts installed by the iOS Creative Cloud app?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Maybe that no one really needs a jackhammer blade for a Swiss Army Knife. 🙂

I understand the usefulness of mobile apps. But there are limits to what you can do on a screen smaller than an original IBM PC's, with your fingertip. And document layout is... way beyond tweaking photos and moving a few vector points around.

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[Conrad C]

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@James Gifford—NitroPress wrote:

I understand the usefulness of mobile apps. But there are limits to what you can do on a screen smaller than an original IBM PC's

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The screen for the original IBM PC was 12 inches. The current 12.9 inch iPad Pro is another inch larger, which makes it about the same size as the 13" Apple RGB Monitor (CRT) that was once the mainstay of many design and production studios, and the 13" PowerBook G3 through MacBook Pro also popular with designers. I laid out many PageMaker and InDesign pages on a 13" screen, although I used a large external display when available.

Some use a simple USB-C dock to put their iPad screen on a large external display.

In the early years of desktop publishing, many large commercial jobs — including page layouts in PageMaker and QuarkXPress — were done on the 9-inch, 1-bit black and white built-in screen of the Macintosh 512K through Mac SE. All current iPad models except the iPad mini have larger screens than that, and they’re full wide gamut color. iPad displays are much closer to print resolution (264 ppi) and have better factory calibration than many of the displays used for most of the history of digital publishing.

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@James Gifford—NitroPress wrote:

…with your fingertip.

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iOS supports connecting an external keyboard and mouse, so desktop productivity is possible, including keyboard shortcuts. (The Photoshop and Lightroom apps for iPad have many keyboard shortcuts.) The mouse or a stylus provide desktop-level precision. They don’t even have to be an Apple keyboard and mouse…the Bluetooth ones I use cost $65 for both.

Current iPads are technically superior to many of the systems that powered commercial publishing up through the 2000s. iOS definitely needs more work to support that hardware properly, but recent upgrades have filled in more of the missing pieces.