Two years ago Adobe introduced its In Design product as a direct rival to Quark XPress. The company simultaneously released Macintosh and PC versions, both of which operate identically (the instruction manual is the same for both). In Design also looks virtually identical to the two other professional Adobe products, Photoshop and Illustrator, which between them have the professional graphics market largely sewn-up. In Design effectively completes a PC publishing triumvirate.

The program reached version 1.5 in the middle last year although didn't deviate from its principle focus of keeping things very simple. In Design is not wizard driven - you don't even get a video tutorial, although sample files aplenty are supplied. However, even a child could knock-up a professional publication in minutes. If you've used any other Adobe product then so much the better because the toolbar is virtually identical, with similar icons and functionality. Elsewhere, concepts that Adobe invented, such as layers and colour swatch palettes, are also present, and serve to make document creation astonishingly quick and easy. As just one example of the product convergence, if you choose to transform some text by stretching or skewing it then you'll see that the In Design dialog box is identical to the one used in Illustrator.

Adobe boast too of In Design's plug-in structure which means the program can easily be expanded by third party companies (the usual example of this being database extensions which would enable you to produce catalogues quickly and easily within In Design). Automatic clipping path creation was also introduced with In Design. This is able to take a graphic and automatically create a text wrap path around it (with varying levels of success). This means that most photographs can be dropped straight into the page without a prior Photoshop session.

Considering Adobe invented the portable document format (PDF) it's no surprise that PDF support is very strong here, both at high resolution and low resolution 'Web' level. Quark Xpress users used to having Adobe Distiller tie up their machines for hours on end will no doubt appreciate this. In Design also has a cool 'pre flight' option which bundles all the pictures and fonts together ready to be transmitted to the printer via ISDN or by CD-R.

There are flies in the ointment. In Design consumes system resources like the clappers - with a complicated document open the program becomes very slow and cranky, even on a reasonably specified machine. It crashed on us a couple of times although recovered the documents when next used.

In Design definitely gives Quark Xpress a run for its money. If you're an experienced Xpress user then the transition to In Design may be rocky but if you're new to professional DTP and have used any other Adobe product then you'd be foolish to consider anything else.