I get a lot of manuscripts in Microsoft Word. Fair enough, as Word’s Track Changes feature is the gold standard for the editorial process. However, once we move from editing to actual typesetting and book layout, Word is horrible. It essentially treats everything (and I mean everything) like a continuous line of text. Graphics placement is a bear, columns and tables are cumbersome, and dependent files are unreliable.

Enter Adobe InDesign (ID). Back in my yearbook days, this was Aldus PageMaker. Adobe bought the company and we now have the ghost of PageMaker present in InDesign. I love the program. It’s much easier to do book layout in an application that treats everything spatially as ID does. No, there aren’t many editorial capabilities for copy in ID, but we’re talking layout here.

Here are some of my favorite comparative reviews from over the years:

Why use InDesign instead of MS Word?

Book Design: MS Word vs. Adobe InDesign

Document Design: Word or InDesign?