Adobe InDesign is, arguably, the greatest software product of all time. It is the dominant software application on this earth for creating print content. If you look at a rack of magazines (assuming you can still find such a thing) you can bet that every single one was created with Adobe InDesign.
Yet InDesign is by no means limited to print. Anything you can create in InDesign can render to a vector or raster image/document. Google has 4,000 seats of InDesign, and they use it not for print, but for infographics. This is because the typography and graphical capability of InDesign are simply unrivaled.
Truly, the “web vs. print” dichotomy is something of an illusion. The reason people think in such “either-or” fashion is that publishing software evolved quite independently on those two tracks: the web was built in a mad rush – led by committees – while print software just kept evolving at a glacial pace, in the hands of proprietary vendors. Designers and developers have come to accept that “never the twain shall meet.”
Web and print differ mainly in terms of two perspectives: “fixed position” (print) vs. “responsive” (web). Do you know any designer who is equally adept at creating content for web and print? I don’t either, other than Chris Converse or Tommy Owen, but they are outliers.
When print-centric designers first began making web pages, they would cringe at the incredible lack of control. The audacity of the content to reflow! The tragedy that ever monitor had different color gamuts! Their world suddenly became one of “write once, debug everywhere.” With mobile (and the concurrent expanse of displays to 4k and beyond), this this trend became ever more extreme.
We at Silicon Publishing live in the chasm between print and the web. For two decades now, we’ve built online editors that round trip HTML and InDesign. Our Silicon Designer product is based on a technology called “SDXML,” which we built in order to reconcile formats.
SDXML is a universal document model: a superset of IDML, HTML5, and other document and image formats. After working for years with many formats, now Adobe Express is in our sights.
Another near dichotomy to note is that of “a document” vs. “an image.” You can look at a piece of content and differentiate bet pretty easily, especially if it’s at one or the other extreme. But there is a ton of middle ground. It really doesn’t matter, yet software tends to focus on one or the other perspective, and designers also tend to work in one or the other paradigm.
Photoshop is raster image software, while Illustrator is vector graphic software, and InDesign is document authoring software, at least in the minds of most people and in the silos of Adobe product management. Yet over time, the functional overlaps have grown to a stunning degree. Photoshop received vectors, vector gradients, rich text, and richer text, while Illustrator now handles multiple pages and InDesign got robust vector art. Do these three really need to be separate products?
Express is a truly exciting piece of software, because it assimilates multiple forms of content. Not just documents and images, but also video, audio, and no doubt more to come. We have already integrated Express into Silicon Designer, letting you use Express as an image editor. Using the Embed SDK, our first integration allows you to select an object in Designer, click the Express button to edit in Express, and then send it back to Designer. When rendered for print, InDesign Server will include PDF output from Express as a graphic.
But we are much more ambitious than that. Just as we round-tripped InDesign with HTML5, we intend to fully round-trip InDesign with Express. We see massive demand for this: many organizations have thousands (or even millions) of documents in InDesign, offering great potential for extending the Express model using InDesign-based constructs.
As of today, in July of 2024, Express already has half of the internal plumbing required to make the full round trip using SDXML. We are deeply thankful for Adobe’s massive investment in extensibility, and the amazing speed of their progress. Exciting times lie ahead.