Whitedog

Flash still works in the Mac OS. It's in iOS that Apple banned Flash, primarily because when the iPhone was first released it didn't have the horsepower to support Flash, which was and is resource intensive. Now that the iPhone does have the horsepower, Flash has been deprecated, even by Adobe, who plan to kill it off entirely in the near future, because, well, the Internet has moved on, just as Steve Jobs said it would. You may still be able to buy a PC with a floppy drive, but you'll have a hard time finding any media to use in it. Apple is not often ahead of the curve any more, but they pioneered the idea of abandoning inefficient technologies for newer and better ones. As for Apple forcing people, that is particularly true with the iOS ecosphere. Of course they do so on the Mac as well, but not quite as extensively. But then, Microsoft used to have that reputation, in spades, and they were liberally sued over restraint of trade issues and had to pull in their horns dramatically. But then Apple does not, even now, have the kind of market dominance that Microsoft did and still does. Not even close. Even so, Microsoft still gets off on denigrating Apple, even though they have much more serious competitors, like Google. Windows fanboys still have the habit. A lot of the seemingly inscrutable business decisions in Big Tech have to do with keeping their products competitive. Oh, and stealing your personal information and selling it. Something, by the way, that Apple, alone among the bit 5, does not do. By the way, not even Adobe CS6 is all 64 bit. Photoshop and Illustrator are. Dreamweaver and InDesign are not. If Adobe were going to upgrade any products to 64 bit it would be those. Not CS 4 or 5. There would be not profit in upgrading those. If you want to continue using CS4, install OS X 10.9 in VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop and run CS4 from there. That's what I will probably be doing, eventually. The real problem with companies not serving the interests of their customers has to do with the size of their business, not actual intention. Small companies are usually more light on their feet as regards customer concerns. The bigger they are, the higher off the ground the executive suite is and the more isolated executives are from their user base. So they get careless, though only occasionally does that result in damage to the company, as was the case with Quark and Blackberry. Others run into trouble with the government, as happened with Microsoft and now is happening to Google, Facebook and Twitter. The days when the Google motto to do no evil was in vogue are long gone. One could say that they ended with Google's IPO. Socialism provided some leverage against capitalist excess, but then we had socialist excess, as in the 35 hour work week in France, which they are unwilling to give up, even for the obvious good of the country. But I'm getting off topic. I only wanted to explain why companies so often seem to be deaf to their customers's concerns. And gigantism is the main cause, in my opinion.

Indeed. Especially in light of the PDF import issues mentioned in this forum. It may work for a quick and dirty edit, but PDF import doesn't actually work very well and is all but useless for long, complex documents. IDML import is probably the best option. Of course a copy and paste that included all styles and formatting from the original document might be preferable. That has worked with MS Word for a very long time, which is one reason it has remained a primary document source. But it might not be possible with InDesign. From what I've read in this forum, IDML import is the only viable option. Of course the most desirable option would be the ability to open an InDesign document directly in Publisher, with all style sheets and formatting preserved, but that seems implausible. So IDML import it is. Up till now placing content in InDesign documents has been my end point. Witch meant getting my text into Word and then into InDesign. If Publisher is to replace InDesign in the future, that means, for me, a different end point, as clearly it does for many other potential users of Publisher. There are innumerable users who cannot afford Adobe any more. And there are many others who want to overcome their dependence of the Adobe ecosystem, for one reason or another. Serif seems the way to go if one wants a well integrated suite of apps, as we have gotten used to with Apple and Adobe. It seems to me that publisher will be the capstone of this suite, if it can do the job. If I were younger, I would jump to Affinity Photo and Designer as well, but I no longer have the energy, or the necessity, to learn such heavy duty apps. My career is winding down. Still, while I don't do much image editing any more, I still write a lot. And sometimes I like to use some style and pizzaz. So a basic text editor is not enough. If I can more away from InDesign, that would be a good thing, for me, anyway. YMMV.

I though of that. But it requires a lot of space on your hard drive for a VM with your entire system in it. That's fine on an iMac with a large internal drive, say 1TB or more. But on a Mac laptop that solution is unlikely to work. And most Macs are now laptops. Which is why I didn't suggest it. But thanks for the solution. I'm sure it will be useful, as I haven't actually done the procedure and would have had to propose it theoretically; and, as I'm sure you know, theory doesn't always work in practice. So now we know it can be done, and how to do it.

One solution is to load an older version of the macOS into VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop and run your 32 bit apps from there. That's what I will probably end up doing, supposing I can find the serial numbers when I reinstall the apps. Besides the cost of Fusion or Parallels there is the question of whether you have enough RAM to run InDesign in as well as a guest OS.

I agree that IDML import is essential. Serif has put off the release of Publisher beyond their original target date in order, as they say, to implement important user feature requests. Presumably this will include IDML import capability. It will make Publisher far more viable, as pretty much everyone on this forum have stated. Meanwhile, I don't know where you get the idea that Adobe will be leaving the Mac platform. Sounds like FUD to me. As for CS6 not working with the next version of macOS, since you're working on a Windows PC I don't understand your concern. The fact is, however, that the next version of the Mac OS, to be released in late 2019, will be incompatible with InDesign CS6, which is a 32 bit app. Of course, no one is obliged to upgrade to the latest OS version. Which is why I'm looking at Publisher. As long as you're using a Windows machine you won't have to worry about Quark. According to the stats at the end of your post you're already running on a 64 bit platform which can, apparently, still use 32 bit apps. As far as I know, Microsoft has not yet specified at 64 bit only version of Windows. Though that day may come eventually. Then you'll have to look at Quark Express—if Publisher doesn't get IDML import.

Of course you won't have to upgrade to that CS6 incompatible version of OS X right away. It's a question of what that OS has to offer compared to what it takes away. One way to preserve access to 32 bit apps will be to create a secondary boot volume with the old OS for use with those apps while upgrading your main system to the latest OS. The most efficient way to do this is to use Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion to create a virtual version of an older iteration of OS X. It's normal, of course, to use those apps to install Windows, but for some time now it has been possible to install OS X, as well as Windows and Linux. You can run Parallels and Fusion in a coherence mode where you don't see the Windows desktop. In that case apps in the VM appear to be running right in OS X, or in this case, your current version of OS X. This might do for people who want or need to retain access to CS6 or earlier.

You can move (reinstall) CS3, but it's a whole lot of trouble. As for supporting a Retina display, in InDesign you can scale up your document's onscreen image without affecting the actual scale of the document. I do this all the time because I am visually impaired and cannot easily read 12 point type. Still, rather than spending the time to learn a new version of InDesign, switching to Affinity Publisher is probably a good idea. You'll still have a lot to learn but it's probably a better investment of your intellectual and financial resources.

Honestly, no company could stay in business if they didn't upgrade their products from time to time. If you like CS4 then you'll have to stay with an OS that supports it. Many people do. I have a friend who really likes Photoshop CS4, for instance. As for InDesign, the upgrades offer new features that many people need, like the ability to handle e-publishing. But compatibility issues will bite us all in the butt eventually. That's why I'm interested in Affinity Publisher. It's already a 64 bit app. So is InDesign CS, but it's $140 a year. So I'll stick with InDesign CS6 as long as I can.

Thanks for the link and the information. I don't know if I'll have occasion to use the script, but I downloaded it and saved the web pages full of instructions. Peter Kahrel went to a lot of trouble to develop this script. I guess that is his cup of tea (and he is British after all). I don't move in those circles but this script seems pretty remarkable to me.

You're right about the price. I had forgotten. Evan at that InDesign CC is competitive, $140 a year and not upgrade costs. In the "old days" Pagemaker competed with Quark. I learned it first in school. But Adobe lost interest in Pagemaker and it fell behind Quark which became dominant as Pagemaker faded. So I studied Quark XPress and used it for awhile. Then InDesign came out and by then I knew my way around page layout programs and so I taught myself how to use it—with the help of some books on the subject, of course. And InDesign gradually replaced Quark in my work environment. At the time I didn't really understand the ins and outs of why Quark had fallen behind. As I recall Quark has always had problems with menus and, of course, their keyboard shortcuts were "different." If you used Adobe Products like Pagemaker, Photoshop and Illustrator, InDesign just fit. You had to learn a whole other vocabulary for XPress. Jumping between Adobe apps and Quark XPress required extra effort not required by InDesign. That wouldn't have mattered so much if Quark had kept up with feature development. But they did not. They rested too long on their laurels, depending, mistakenly, on customer loyalty. And, of course, their customer support was notoriously unpleasant and drove many people to the alternative product which was, after all, not so hard to learn, where help was relatively easy to come by. I've participated on Adobe forums (mostly for Lightroom) where "experts" and even Adobe engineers participate, answering questions and dealing up front with issues and bug reports, some of which were quite contentious. I can't say if Quark has anything comparable; I haven't used the product since version 8.5, the last one for which I had an education discount. I didn't use it much even then because I had moved on to InDesign. As for fixing their issues with menus and such, they would have to see them as issues before they made an effort to fix them. And it may be that, once again, they are wearing blinders, refusing to recognize their usability issues. I expect they wouldn't have to hire anybody. They've got plenty of talent in house. But, as with Adobe, and Apple for that matter, it depends on where the company decides to employ that talent. I ran into that issue on the Adobe forums. Management just didn't have the same priorities their users did when it came to fixing problems. It's a matter of allocation of resources. Apple, for instance, is notorious for a short attention span. They'd rather invent a new product than fix an old one. So we lost AppleWorks, an superior app in its time, and Aperture, also a competent app before Apple's attention wandered. iWeb, an easy to use template driven web design program before template driven web design programs became ubiquitous. But iWeb depended on Apple cloud resources, something else Apple has only ever addressed half-heartedly. In contrast, Adobe has really committed to their cloud strategy, beyond just the CC apps. If you work in a corporate environment I imagine their cloud is a fine way to manage assets—for a price, of course. I haven't heard that Quark has anything comparable. Again Adobe is excelling here. Most people now use smart phones as cameras, so Adobe developed a mobile version of Lightroom that utilizes the cloud to store your photos on the fly. You can do a lot with Lightroom CC right on your phone. As processors become more powerful it will only get better. I have a particular advantage in that I live close enough to San Jose that I can attend the Photoshop user's group there, which meets on the Adobe campus and has access to Adobe experts of all kinds. They welcome feedback and it's a wonderful way for them to proselytize their products. And we get free pizza and soda to boot. That's where I learned about Lightroom in the beginning, when it was in beta. It was an exciting time, when digital photography was taking over from film. Again, they wanted to hear form us—and the app was free to use, which was an excellent way to develop mind share. Which became market share when the release version came out. And recently they cleared up my confusion about Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic, which is the desktop version of the app that I use most. They messed up with naming the thing, but the two track approach is sound enough once you get used to their renaming scheme. Photoshop and Lightroom are special cases, of course, because Adobe offers them in an inexpensive package deal. InDesign has no such advantage. Perhaps Serif doesn't even know yet whether Publisher will follow the low cost model of Infinity Designer and Photo. But I hope they do, as do most of their beta testers, I'm sure. This would explain why they haven't commented on the subject on this forum.

Adobe didn't kill Quark. Quark killed Quark. They made some exceedingly stupid decisions and let InDesign steal a march on them with appealing and useful features. Among other things InDesign was first with OS X support on the Mac. It wasn't until Quark was reorganized that they finally woke up to their peril. But by then it was too late. InDesign had replaced Quark in dominant mind share and market share. And, of course, it was integrated into Adobe's CS suite, which included Photoshop and Illustrator. Adobe also began expanding their graphic design footprint, picking up Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash from Macromedia. QuarkXPress is still a viable app and preceded InDesign into e-publishing. That was an advantage for awhile. Now, of course, InDesign supports e-publishing more or less effectively. But, besides Serif and others on the graphic design front, WordPress is gobbling up space in blogging and web design. Of course there are other players in those fields as well so that Dreamweaver is not as essential as it once was. Adobe has alienated a lot of people with their subscription software model, but they are hardly the Anti-Christ. In contrast to Quark they've made some excellent marketing decisions. For example, when Apple came out with Aperture, focusing specifically on digital photography, they offered no trial period. It was a unique app for a short time so some people ponied up Apple's asking price of $500. Then Lightroom came out in a mature beta which they provided for free for almost a year until version one came out. And then they undercut Apple's price by $200. By the time I paid $300 for the first full release of Lightroom I had been using it free for a year. Apple ended up cutting the price of Aperture and rebating the difference to their original customers, and providing a trial period for Aperture. But by then Lightroom had done to Aperture what InDesign did to Quark: They had the lions' share of the digital photography market. And they cut the price in half and set upgrades even lower. Apple never recovered from their stumbling start and development on Aperture lagged. Like Quark, Apple decided not to compete. Unlike Quark with XPress, though, Apple abandoned Aperture. Now Lightroom has moved onto the iPhone and the iPad, and Photoshop just joined it there. Apple has plenty of other fish to fry so they are cooperating with Adobe in this (as they've often done before). After all, Lightroom on the iPhone and Photoshop on the iPad can only help iPhone and iPad sales, which is where Apple really makes their money. Other than macOS X, software has always been a side show with Apple. For Adobe, software is their bread and butter. I avoided the Creative Cloud for a long time but they offer their Photography suite for $10 a month so I finally bit the bullet. Lightroom Classic for the desktop, Lightroom CC for the iPhone (and the desktop—and the cloud) and Photoshop CC. But InDesign has no comparable discount. Hence my interest in Affinity Publisher.

You don't need Sun Tzu or Machiavelli to work out Adobe's business strategy on this point. For one thing, Publisher won't represent any kind of a threat to Adobe for some time to come—if it ever does. If they change the INDD file format it will probably be for reasons having nothing to do with Affinity Publisher, which is not yet out of beta. Adobe already provides a more or less universal version for InDesign files with the IMDL format, which permits collaboration between people using differing versions of InDesign, and some non-Adobe applications as well. If Publisher can handle IMDL files they won't have to bother with INDD, supposing it's as tricky as some folks here suggest. On another topic, some have put in a claim for Quark XPress compatibility. Supposing Serif considers that important, if you wan't some insight into why Quark is so much less important than it once was, check out this detailed article in ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/quarkxpress-the-demise-of-a-design-desk-darling/. It turns out there was a lot I didn't know on the subject, in particular how InDesign spanked Quark on important feature development. For instance, in the subtle case of hanging type and not so subtle support for OpenType. And much else besides. Now, of course, Adobe has become complacent and, some feel, negligent of customer concerns. Though, in my opinion, Adobe has a long way to go to be as arrogant as Quark once was. And they are hardly resting on their laurels; consider Lightroom on the iPhone and Photoshop on the iPad. Of course the problem with Quark XPress is that it is still prohibitively expensive. If you add in the cost of the occasional upgrade for Quark, the price of InDesign CC is not nearly so daunting. Of course we may only guess that Affinity Publisher will be priced the same as Affinity Photo and Designer. If it is, and if it is relatively feature complete when it comes out of beta, then it will have great appeal for those, like me, looking to break with, or avoid Adobe—and Quark. As for those with established InDesign workflows, the issue is more problematic.

Well...we still need to know with some degree of assurance what Serif's plans are for InDesign compatibility. IDML would be better than nothing. But will it happen? If not, Affinity Publisher will be far less feasible an upgrade path than it might be.

Which is one reason, besides the price, I have not upgraded to InDesign CC. And it's why I'm looking to Publisher going forward. In the meantime, I still use InDesign CS6. Unfortunately it's not a 64 bit app on the Mac. But I won't have to worry about that for awhile; I'm still using macOS 10.12.6 Sierra. For that matter, even 10.14 Mojave still supports 32 bit apps, however grudgingly. The only Adobe app I still need is Lightroom because I have so many legacy files which Affinity Photo can't handle. But it's not expensive, unlike InDesign. So, for me the question will be, will Publisher be able to handle, one way or another, InDesign CS6 files which, after all, are stable not not subject to change?

Right on. Nostalgia is overrated. I started with Photoshop 2.5 on a Mac. It was great because I'd never done graphics on a computer before. But it doesn't hold a candle to Photoshop today. And though Photoshop now is orders of magnitude more complex than Photoshop 2.5, it's just as easy to learn because I've been using Photoshop for 20 years. The learning curve is relative. Which is why I was able to teach myself InDesign because I'd learned Pagemaker and Quark XPress first—in a school environment. Just so many people will find Publisher easy to learn because they've developed expertise in other layout programs. Now, if you are starting out to learn any of these programs from scratch, they will be difficult to master. A class or two at your local junior collage is easily the best way to learn, in my opinion. Even though a how-to book might suffice, you can't ask it questions, or get inspiration and motivation as you can from fellow students. I have plenty of how-to books but I use them for reference once I've left the classroom. In a class, you learn from other student's mistakes as well as your own. By the way, avoid crash courses. They skip a lot to get the job done in a limited time frame. Unless you're super smart, like most people you can't absorb information fast enough. Which is why college quarters and semesters are as long as they are. It takes time and effort for most people to learn new stuff. Personally I prefer semesters. YMMV. If learning comes easy to you, that's cool, but you're not most people. In practical terms, old software just can't cut it today. If you do layout and design for a living, you need something approaching the latest software. That's why people keep their nostalgia in the basement under the cobwebs.

As for why people left Quark, I'm not sure why that happened. I tried InDesign back in the day because it was the newest thing on the block, before Adobe had lost so much of its own luster. But InDesign wasn't originally a Quark killer. It took years for it to come up to Quark's capabilities. The main issue with Quark XPress for me was that you needed expensive extensions to do things that should have been built into the program. There may have been reasons for that, to avoid application bloat for one thing; people could get just the extensions they needed and avoid the rest. And, well, Photoshop used extensions as well, so it wasn't as if that was a new concept. In any case, my quibbles probably weren't determinative. Having learned PageMaker and Quark XPress in school, it was relatively easy to teach myself InDesign. And I bought a few books for reference, as any good student would. Perhaps the main reason that Quark XPress faded was the ever-expanding Adobe ecosystem. Many a competitor was subsumed to that ecosystem. Subsumed and then killed off. The only app I remember that Adobe invested any real capital in was Dreamweaver. Meantime, WordPress is rapidly taking over web design jobs. If I remember correctly, the trouble Quark had was with corporate leadership, which may have caused more trouble in the market than new leadership could come back from. Quark was always an expensive application, though inflation has cut into that substantially. Unlike with Adobe CC, though, if you are in school you can still get a student version of Quark (for under $100) and continue to use it after you move on. The question is, of course, how widely Quark is still taught in schools. I guess the moral is that bad leadership can ruin even a successful business. Still, Quark is hanging in there and remains competitive, in capability at least. The last version of Quark I have on my Mac is 8.5, which is way old. But since I no longer use it, upgrading has not seemed necessary.

I'm running macOS 10.12.6 Sierra and Photoshop CS4 appears to work just fine. I keep it around in order to use my old Epson scanning software, which is 32 bit. VueScan, which is 64 bit now has a plugin for Photoshop CC, but I've had issues with it from time to time. For simple scanning Epson Scan is sufficient. I haven't yet tested it in High Sierra or Mojave. I imagine I will eventually. In any case, for CS4 you don't have to stick to El Capitan, which is now out from under the Apple security umbrella. If that doesn't bother you, El Cap is a perfectly good version of OS 10. As for InDesign, the oldest version I still have on my Mac is CS5. But I use IDCS6. CS5 still works, though. High Sierra is said to have some issues with InDesign, but as I said, I haven't tested it yet. YMMV. The real cut-off for 32 bit apps will come with macOS 10.15 next year, which will be 64 bit only. But no one has to upgrade.

No doubt that's because you have thousands and thousands of images in the catalog.

Though Lightroom started on the Mac, it, and, I presume, ACDSee work the same on Windows as they do on the Mac. ACDSee appears to be much like Adobe bridge with editing tools. Long ago Bridge was part of Photoshop but it slowed down the app so much that Adobe turned it into a separate unit. The catalog function in Lightroom does not seem to slow that app down much; it saves thumbnails so you can view things easily. ACDSee is on sale again at $34.95, though that appears to be for the old version, 3.7.2, the demo download. Then there's upgrade pricing at $24.95 for version 4. Which, surprise, totals the same as Affinity Photo, at $50. Though this is off topic in a Publisher forum, it seems tangentially relevant. The fact that you have to create an account to register the product before you can unlock it bothers some people. But it's in line with many professional apps, including those from Adobe. I simply opted out of their e-mail alerts program.

I took a look at ACDSee some years ago but it was new and underdeveloped at the time. If you like it you should post a review on MacUpdate because most reviews are not favorable. Maybe I'll check out the demo again. That said, I like Lightroom just fine.

I agree that the facility to import IDML files is all that is necessary (along with Word, rtf and plain text). But I disagree with your reasoning for not exporting IDML. If it could be done it would be a great advantage to Affinity, rather than a a disadvantage. But it is probably not practical. As for what formats Publisher should support, besides PDF, it will eventually need to support ePub, though that may be down the road. And, of course, the native Affinity format. While it used to be expensive for a print shop to adopt new software, Affinity's apps are well within reach, no subscription required. Anyway, in most cases a PDF is sufficient, as long as it has been proofed properly.

There are (at least) two distinct markets for InDesign. The large volume publisher/printer who can account for the expense of a Creative Cloud subscription at marginal cost to their clients, and the small margin pro/sumer market where the expense is hard to manage. Many of these, including myself, have stuck with InDesign (and Photoshop, etc.) CS6 because they cannot afford the ongoing cost of CC. The first group will have little if any incentive to move to another publishing suite. For the rest of us, for whom CC is out of reach, Affinity Publisher will have great appeal, even with possible conversion issues. Taken together with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer it may easily supplant Adobe in this secondary market. Not that Adobe will mind as they have ceased to care about entry level users. There was a time when you could get Adobe programs with a student discount and continue to use them until you established yourself professionally and needed an upgrade. Now, when you are no longer a student, you are stuck with the full cost of a CC subscription immediately, whether you can afford it or not. Adobe no doubt sees this as a way to hold on to customers; their customers may see it as an incentive to find an alternative to Adobe as soon as possible. That would seem to be a perfect niche for Affinity. The ex-student will have a modest investment in Adobe centered assets; migrating to Affinity will be relatively easy and certainly far less expensive. As far as I know, the Affinity suite is the only substantial alternative to Adobe's publishing and design programs. To replace Dreamweaver there are innumerable web design apps, including the ever more popular WordPress; for audio and video there are powerful programs from Apple that can compete with Premier, et al. This won't help those using Windows PCs, but they probably have alternatives of which I am unaware. It is my humble hope that Serif will help break up the Adobe monopoly among creative amateurs and professionals alike. May the force be with them.

Does that mean that if I have InDesign CC files, if I save them as IDML, that I can open them in, InDesign CS6 or earlier? If so, that would enable one to stop a CC subscription and nevertheless be able to open CC files, if they are saved in IDML.

Thank you for enlightening me. Can you tell me what advantage IDML has over a standard ID package, which includes linked images?

When I first searched for VivaDesigner I was directed to the Linux version. I've done a more thorough search and found the Mac and Windows versions. Still, it's an app I've never heard of, though apparently it's been around for awhile—its now at version 9. It is apparently aimed at more industrial uses, for automating catalog production, for example. As for IDML, I also had a mistaken impression—since I never used it in InDesign. It seemed unnecessary; packaging a project seemed good enough and the service bureaus I've used were satisfied with that. Then again, if your project is large, containing numerous images, IDML might be desirable because it compresses to a zip archive, no doubt saving considerable space. These days, though, saving space is less important than it used to be. Thumb drives are available with huge capacities, far eclipsing CDs, DVDs and even BluRay. And a USB 3 thumb drive writes and reads much faster than any optical media. Then again, if you use the cloud to transfer your project, IDML might be useful, as Internet bandwidth can sometimes be an issue. And file corruption over the web is also a concern; zipping a file can prevent that. So I apologize for not remembering what IDML stands for. Opening an IDML file with a normal word processor would, of course, be unnecessary in most cases, so that was a red herring I followed when I landed on a Linux page for VivaDesigner. That being said, I can understand why people looking for InDesign compatibility might look for IDML compatibility as well.