Value for money?

I've been using CC since it was released. I use it for both my day job and my home studio work. Two separate licenses. While I'm not wild about paying $80 a month, I can understand the reasoning for this business model. I don't like that I only have access to the software for as long as my subscription is current, but it makes sense.

My big complaints have to do with Adobe failing to address obvious problems and limitations with their software. For instance, I do not see why Illustrator and InDesign aren't multithreaded. I've had a multiple cpu/core system since early 2001. In Windows, why don't we have GPU acceleration in InDesign? Those two performance issues comprise most of the time I have to spend waiting for Illustrator or InDesign to actually do something. The computer should be waiting for me to do something, not the other way around. It seems that Adobe just doesn't care.

At least CC will run on a toaster. It's just too bad that there isn't much of a performance improvement for having comparatively great hardware...

Anyway, I have to add that it seems odd that someone who has been using InDesign for so long has had such problems with using layers and master (ahem!) parent pages. Maybe Microsoft Publisher would be a better fit? (I did not mean that as an insult.)

Thank you for this - if it's a wrist-slap I deserve, then I'm happy to hold my hands up and accept it. But I'm still quite puzzled. I do understand the principles of layering and I promise you that I tried every possible permutation of stacking (without actually creating layers) without success. It didn't work then but now it does. It must have been me who got it wrong - I just don't see how.

My workaround was to pull the tint frame up short, Override All Parent Page Items on that page and Bring To Front the page no frame. I got my page number and no-one was any the wiser. I don’t understand why that was necessary, though. I've used this kind of layout many times in the past and it has never given me a problem before. Tbh, I'm not sure if I ever fully realised the master page goes on top of the document - again, because I've never had a reason to query it. But if that's the case, why is there an option to Bring To Front/Send To Back on the master page? Does it not interact with the layering of the document itself?

No-one mentioned my other problem - the blanking of text frames when either highlighting text or inserting a cursor. This is, in fact, far more irritating. There's no rhyme or reason to it happening - I click in a frame, it sometimes goes blank. The only remedy is to refresh the screen - except that Shift-F5 does nothing. I have to hold a frame handle momentarily and drop it back into place. It's not a debilitating issue for any work I'm doing, but it is quite irritating to have to deal with. Is all this liable to be a problem with the software? Do I need to download it again or something?

I’m not going to backtrack on anything I said earlier – I still believe much of what Adobe does to be unnecessary. But InDesign is still a joy to use and produces great results.

Thanks for your help – feel free to excoriate me. Again.

Hi

Thanks for the replies. I’m posting here because it’s easier (and quicker!) than replying individually. Hope everyone’s OK with this.

Firstly, thanks for the replies – it’s gratifying to see so many of you take the time to answer. I note the respondents ranged for the Ultra-Pro-Adobe-Must-Not-Be-Criticised to the, shall we say, rather more measured and considered responses. Which is another way of saying that some people agreed with me while others didn’t. That’s fine – I like a debate.

I had to laugh, though, when someone claimed that not following the subscription model would ‘undercut the sustaining revenue for development’. I think that when you’re talking about a company that made almost five billion dollars in profit last year, development revenue is less of an expense than might be supposed. I suspect most of that goes on trying to find reasons why users ought to think the newest, tweaked version is better than the last.

But the concept itself is a little disingenuous. The core purpose of InDesign hasn’t really changed since it was first introduced. If I remember rightly (and like others here, I am also in my sixties and semi-retired), its initial selling point was to provide a dependable system of print production that would seamlessly integrate with other Adobe products such as Photoshop and Illustrator. In reality, its purpose seemed to be to cut the legs from under Quark Xpress which was, until then, the industry production standard. After all, why not? It’s a dog-eat-dog world and Quark had done exactly the same thing to Aldus Pagemaker (which I think Adobe bought?) a few years previously. Adobe made their intentions even more obvious by incorporating a palette of Quark keyboard shortcuts that made the transition so much smoother. I think I still use them, in fact.

Having said that, no one who used ID could fail to be impressed by it. Since then, though, newer versions don’t seem to have progressed to a startling extent. They certainly look sleeker and there are additional output modes, such as epub, but many of the advances seem to be self-perpetuating – in other words, modifications to keep up with the modifications in the other Adobe software. Are there any real advances in InDesign’s core purpose of creating layouts onscreen that will translate either to print or the web? Please correct me if I’m wrong (as if you won’t…) but it doesn’t seem like it to me.

It was also interesting to see that the responses centred around the rights (or wrongs) of the subscription model, with few mentions of the irritating tiny issues I’ve had. Also of the assumptions made about my background. FYI I’m neither a weekend dabbler or newsletter creator – in fact, I produce a full-colour A4 magazine of anything between 96-130 pages each month. I’m utilising the skills learned over several very enjoyable decades with the big boys to create something that helps my adopted community. I love doing it – it keeps me active and it keeps me sane. Like anyone in my line of work would do, I utilise shortcuts in my production routine to ease my workflow but it’s still quite pressured. Pretty much how I like it, really.

(I don’t know if this still makes a difference but I’m using a brand-new Dell Vostro, btw, with an intel Core i5 processor. 500GB hard drive, 350GB free space. 16GB RAM. Windows 11 Pro. One of my in-laws has a dealership and sourced this for us. Runs great, actually.)

The people who gave me well-meaning advice on layering – thank you, but I’ve been doing this too long now not to know that a colour panel goes under everything else on the page. You weren’t to know, though, so I appreciate you taking the time to explain it. It did, however, make me check whether the non-display of page nos was a glitch caused by using transferred page files from CS6. But when I created new ones I found the same issue exists, even when I Apply Parent to a page. I get around it by simply dropping the page nos in manually. I really shouldn’t need to, though – not for this money.

The people who think CC is really cheap – I’m glad you’re so successful that you hardly need to worry about such outlays. But not everyone is like you and I think it’s a pity that scant regard is paid to users like us.

Those who mentioned Affinity Publisher – thank you very much. When this deal is done, AP might be the answer as far as we’re concerned. I had no idea it even existed, but it certainly looks interesting. I’ll quite probably buy a copy in the New Year and run the two side by side to see how it performs. (Apparently it does produce PDFs, by the way, in v2. If I can get a PDF, I can get a magazine. Whoopee.)

To those who were a bit scathing about using old versions of software – I presume that, sooner or later, Adobe will pull the plug on CS6 and pretty much deactivate it online. The tide of time creeps on and I think anything up to CS4 is now dead – is that right? But surely a standalone machine with no internet connection will avoid authentication servers entirely and be able to run CS6 ad infinitum? Create a pdf, put it onto a stick and then move it to a machine that has access to Dropbox.

This is what I meant about built-in obsolescence – as someone said, software will run as long as there are machines to run it on and, if the features of an earlier version are all I need, why would I suddenly pay a monthly fee to do exactly the same thing? That smacks of extortion, tbh.

This reply won’t satisfy everyone, I know. I don’t particularly blame Adobe for what they’re doing – just for pitching their prices at the top end of the market and dismissing the smaller users who genuinely needed them. After all, what alternative did they have? And again, as someone said – the answer to that is Affinity Publisher. But once people go there, they may not come back.

Please come back to me - I'm interested to know what you think.

Thanks for your help.

Affinity Publisher would be perfect for you!

No offence and just as a joke 😉

I'm pretty sure your organisation is spending more every month on a toilet paper - which literally goes down the drain 😉

Again, not to be harsh, but... do you produce your magazine for free? No? Then simply consider the CC cost to be a necessary and worthwhile part of your production cost, instead of the slightly unrealistic idea that software is an amortized asset. Very little quality or pro software is sold on the "one and done" plan any more... not even MS Office or QuickBooks.

What you get for that continuing cost is continual updates, both for new features and for bugfixes/patches etc. Those of us who remember the purchase/paid update days and no two shops, printer or providers being at quite the same software version never look back with nostalgia from this era of "everyone in step, everyone updated, all the time."

I'd wager $30-50 a month is among the very minor costs in your production budget. View it that way instead as of "wasted money."

As for the problems you're experiencing, most seem to be from not accommodating the functional changes in ID over the last decade — some things simply work differently, such as layered objects on Parent pages. You can and will work out these glitches in your work routine. And, if you're smart, you will spend time reviewing all the new and changed features, and likely find that you can streamline your workflow, improve your layouts and in the end, improve the quality of your production. Money well spent over laboring along with a tool designed in 2008 or so. 🙂

>There is also a bizarre issue of page numbers not displaying on pages that have a tint-panel background. Doesn't matter what I do, they just don't show. Again - why is something so rudimentary such a problem?

Use Layers and keep everything on the Parent (Master) page on the top layer, put anything on the page itself on layers below that 😉 Very, very easy.

Is your organization a registered 501(c)3? If so, you may be eligible for a discount.

Maybe find someone who will rent CC from you and keep using CS6?

You can install CC on two PCs at the same time - as long as the same program isn't used on both PCs at the same time... so someone else can use your ID CC when you'll be using ID CS6 + PS CC...

Well, I'm in the other camp.

I'm retired now and can easily understand how it's really hard to justify the expense of an annual subscription if you aren't making money with the software, especially if you don't need the features that have been added to inDesign since CS6 (though the price is pretty good if you are using three or four programs on a regular basis).

I continue to run CS6 on Windows 10, and I think there are still users running it on Windows 11, though not everyone has great success (I've had no insurmountable problems, myself). The downside is there are no patches publicly available so you need to find the updated program files elsewhere (I copied mine from an old Win7 system and overwrote the program folder after installing on Windows 10) and the only tech support you are likely to find is from a few users here.

I tend to agree with you that Adobe has written off the small shop and amateur user market.