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InDesign is the direct competitor to QuarkXPress. In 2002, it was the first Mac OS X-native desktop publishing (DTP) software. Moreover, InDesign CS and InDesign CS2 were bundled with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat in the Creative Suite. InDesign exports documents in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), has multilingual support. It was the first DTP application to support Unicode for text processing, advanced typography with OpenType fonts, advanced transparency features, layout styles, optical margin alignment, and cross-platform scripting using JavaScript.

InDesign is the successor alternative to Adobe's own PageMaker. Designers are the principal users in creating and laying out periodical publications, posters, and print media; nevertheless, longer documents still are designed with FrameMaker (manuals, technical documents, etc.), or with QuarkXPress (books, catalogs, etc.). Using a relational database, InDesign and Adobe InCopy word processor use the same formatting engine as InDesign.

Later versions of the software introduced new file formats. To support the new features (especially typographic) introduced with InDesign CS, both the program and its document format are not retro-compatible, but the InDesign CS2 has the retro-compatible .inx format, an XML-based document representation. InDesign CS versions updated with the 3.01 April 2005 update (free from the Adobe website) can read InDesign CS2-saved files exported to the .inx format. The InDesign Interchange format does not support versions earlier than InDesign CS.