I love you, InDesign, but it’s time to let you go

I love you, InDesign, but it’s time to let you go. We just can’t be together in a multi-format world.

InDesign is expensive, so I can’t have my whole team working in it. It’s so powerful that it takes years of experience to use it without making a mess. And it’s fundamentally incapable of producing both print PDF and ready-to-use HTML from a single master file, despite some amazing hacks.

Adobe has tried valiantly to turn this page-based, hot-lead-replacement into a multi-format tool, but its roots in print are just too deep. Making books in InDesign and converting them to high-quality ebooks and websites is a rocky journey that leaves even the smartest typesetters bloodied and broke.

At Fire and Lion we make a lot of books for screen and paper (mostly for publishing companies and non-profits). To our clients, what matters most is that the books are well-crafted in every format, and that working with us is problem-free. Behind the scenes, we have to do something special to make that possible.

So the first thing we do is avoid using InDesign for setting everything but the most heavily illustrated books. We don’t do page-by-page layout and convert to HTML later. In fact, we do exactly the opposite: we make each book as a little website, and then output to PDF.

Fire and Lion makes responsive websites that respond not only to screen sizes but to the pages of a book.

To put it another way: Fire and Lion makes responsive websites that respond not only to screen sizes but to the pages of a book. And we do it so well that, looking at the finished product, you can’t tell the difference between our books and those you’d get from a typesetter working in InDesign.

We’ve been lucky to work with clients who’ve let us make their books with this cutting-edge toolset. You have to be brave to accept a GitHub repository as your open files, rather than an InDesign package; but it’s brave people like that who move our industry forward.

Nothing we’re doing is a secret: our workflow is open. So when we’re not making books, we’ll be talking about how we make them. If you’re working with similar tools, or curious about ours, let us know.

First published on arthurattwell.com.