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Ask HN: Viable InDesign Alternative?

by WritelyDesigned on 7/13/15, 8:40 PM with 7 comments

There's been a decent amount of buzz around Mac apps like Sketch, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo, and others for replacing Adobe apps like Photoshop and Illustrator.

Some have gone so far as to ditch Adobe CC entirely and turn to these new-ish apps exclusively.

My question is: does anyone know of a viable InDesign alternative? I haven't seen one to date and wanted to know if there's one in existence or in the works.

  • by seekingcharlie on 7/14/15, 3:24 AM

    I haven't found anything that really beats InDesign itself for heavy print work, but I have been using Sketch for web marketing material (brochures, getting started guides etc) and it's worked so far.

    I'm using the pixel dimensions of Letter paper, which is not really ideal, but does work if you need to print. Also, when you export your Sketch artboards to PDF, they're huge so I open the PDF's in Acrobat after to create compressed versions.

    My workflow is 95% Sketch at this stage. I still use PS for image-editing and I keep Illustrator & InDesign installed, but honestly haven't opened them in months, since transitioning to Sketch.

  • by hluska on 7/13/15, 9:27 PM

    Have you tried Scribus?? When I used to publish a magazine, we started with InDesign and moved over to Scribus. It took awhile to get used to, but once we got it set up, it was extremely powerful!

    My email is in my profile - use it if you need help!

  • by therealmarv on 7/13/15, 8:55 PM

    Is not this solvable by using google? ;)

    http://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-indesign/