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VERDICT: New effects enable richer design results while a host of other improvements boost productivity.

By combining photos from Photoshop and illustrations from Illustrator with its own text, layout, formatting and output strengths, InDesign CS3 stands out as the central application in Adobe’s vision of the modern publishing workflow. It also stands out because it is the only one of the three main CS3 design applications that faces any serious competition.

Tom Arah looks at the surprising history of professional desktop publishing and the current state of play.

The generally-accepted wisdom is that desktop publishing (DTP) was invented by Steve Jobs and Apple with the launch of the Apple Mac in 1984. It’s certainly true that the Mac’s Graphical User Interface (GUI) enabled bitmapped fonts, images and layouts to be both viewed onscreen and printed – a whole new world compared to character-based PC systems.