When will Adobe InDesign would be available on IPad Pro

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It is absolutely not a matter of “translating” InDesign to the iPad!!!

Unlike Photoshop and Illustrator that primarily deal with one type of file format, raster and vector respectively, InDesign is at the heart of some very complex production workflows in which content of multiple types both from local file systems and the network is placed into InDesign documents. Often, many gigabytes of content (text, vector, raster, and mixtures of same) using many different fonts (and font styles) and ICC color profiles come together into an InDesign document and InDesign-based workflow with output directed to screen, print, or both (either directly or through a bunch of other file formats).

It isn't a matter of translating high level language code from Intel-based processors to ARM-based processors, but rather, trying to deal with the exceptionally limited operating system services and user-accessible features that iPadOS provides compared to either Windows or MacOS. Problem areas include font (a four letter word beginning with an ‘f’) support, color support including support for ICC color management profiles and spot colors, and general hierarchical and network file system support.

Yes, one could put together an InDesign Junior program that supports a limited subset of InDesign features or a version that is somewhat incompatible with InDesign on Windows and MacOS, but we strongly suspect that our users would be screaming about the actual usefulness of such a product.

It has been pointed out that Adobe now has iPadOS versions of both Photoshop and Illustrator, but the feature sets of both including the ability to deal with all graphic arts assets is somewhat limited. It is very easy to demo such iPadOS product versions dealing with simple designs without external dependencies (including myriads of fonts, profiles, plug-ins and scripts), but you would find an iPad an exceptionally-challenging environment for complex designs and real world production workflows where Wacom tablets, keyboards, and large (and multiple) high-resolution, color-calibrated monitors reign supreme (even large screen notebook computers running Windows or MacOS don't really cut it in those environments).

May I recommend the following:

(1)    Go to https://indesign.uservoice.com/  and vote for such a version of InDesign (with justification and real use cases) or if there isn't already such a request, start one. Adobe's InDesign product mangement and engineering doesn't officially monitor these communities. Here, you are primarily talking to other InDesign users.

(2)    Directly lobby Apple to extend iPadOS from it's “walled-garden” environment to one that can host real world production environments that require file system access and support for user-installed fonts (other than by store purchases and special services), profiles, scripting, plug-ins, etc.

Here at Adobe we'd be very interested in knowing what “rep” you had a chat with gave you such erroneous information.

At no point has Adobe ever promised or even hinted at InDesign on iOS or iPadOS. As I have personally explained earlier in this thread, there are any number of very important reasons why anything resembling a full version of InDesign could not be readily implemented on an iPad.

Hi Dov. I'm one of the first book authors/publishers in the country to have ditched Quark for what was then a new program called InDesign. People said I was crazy, but I thought InDesign 1.0 looked amazing, and didn't require the stupid dongle that Quark did. That was 9 editions of my book ago. (The book was soon adopted by college instructors, and grew to more than 1,000 pages.)

I'll still be sending the 10th edition of my book to press in InDesign. But I'm thinking of doing the rewriting and the raw editing on my new iPad Pro 12.9" with the magic keyboard. (This might be a horrible idea, but I find the display on the iPad Pro 12.9" such a pleasure to view and my eyes are not as resilient as they were 20+ years ago.) After I'm done, I'll send all 50 chapters to my desktop and port them into InDesign one by one. My question is if you have any suggestions for a word processing program to use on my iPad that will work well with InDesign when I'm ready to do the typesetting in InDesign. I had been set on using Ulysses, but I've been reading reviews by a couple of former Ulysses evangelists who ditched Ulysses for iAWriter after Ulyssess mysteriously lost some of their revisions. 

Any advice you have would be greatly appreciated. I also trust you'll tell me if you think I'm crazy and should be doing the rewrite on a MacBook instead of an iPad Pro.  Thanks so very much. --Paul