Adobe Software Must Die

Time for part two in my series of "must die" stories, Adobe Software Must Die.

By this point, we are all more or less familiar with Adobe Software. Their format PDF, a bastardization of PostScript (which is also their invention) has become ubiquitous on the internet as a means of transferring files in a true WYSIWYG fashion. Many websites use PDF for a great deal of content because HTML is not WYSIWYG - it is displayed differently by every browser and users can apply their own styles to documents, further altering them from the designer's intent.

Adobe is also the de facto standard for desktop publishing today. While Quark Xpress has formerly held the lion's share of the DTP market in terms of layout software, Adobe's InDesign (itself based on their product Pagemaker which they acquired when they purchased Aldus many years back) is rapidly taking over. Illustrator has always been and continues to be the dominant vector graphics manipulation software. Photoshop is still the top software for photomanipulation. And the majority of video processing on the PC is still done with a combination of Adobe's Premiere and After Effects.

All of this software, with the possible exception of Photoshop, is turning into complete shit.

My employer forcibly offered our graphic artist the opportunity to seek new employment opportunities, and as I am the individual with the most experience with the relevant programs, I was selected to become the new graphic artist. This is really not at all my line of work, or my area of expertise, or really something I'm particularly good at. I just happen to know my way around desktop publishing software and the like. My mother is a graphic artist whose work has won numerous awards and while she didn't really teach me all that much, I learned quite a bit from osmosis just by watching her work, looking at her work in progress, and so on. So, here I sit, in the graphic artist chair.

I was hired as the "database manager" (really, I do database reporting and not administration) and later took over the website. Then we got the Scala Infochannel Designer software, and I took over digital signage. But now I am doing this graphic arts work. Consequently I have my nose in Adobe software all day. The former graphic artist was a Quark fan but I've found that Quark is an even bigger pile of crap.

Now, "back in the day" Adobe used to turn out some of the best software around. It was reliable, it was functional, and it was logical. You found things where you expected to find them and things worked pretty much as you would expect. Since that time, Adobe has merged the Aldus product line (or the functionality of those programs) into their own software, and has also purchased software giant Macromedia, best known for the web animation and graphics software Flash and web editing software Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver in particular has always been a dodgy piece of software and unreliable in the extreme. In particular I've always had problems with FTP. Over the years, the quality of HTML produced by Dreamweaver has plummeted and now it is common to see it produce empty pairs of tags and such, much in the way that Microsoft's software FrontPage has always behaved. The WYSIWYG view supports dramatically less CSS than either Internet Explorer or Firefox, the two dominant browsers on the web, making me wonder if there is really any point whatsoever to keeping Dreamweaver going at all. It cannot be used to design CSS-based content as its treatment of CSS is utterly incorrect, and the whole world is going CSS.

InDesign has been a bear in particular. A lot of things don't behave the sensible way they used to in Pagemaker, instead adopting the ridiculously stupid ways that were utilized in Quark. In particular the way text and graphics are placed in a document has been lifted directly from Quark, and text frames are significantly less well-behaved for it. Even when instructed to show control characters, the "story mode editor" will fail to show control characters when text is pasted from many applications - but more than that, it sometimes fails to edit them even when a whole block of text containing them is deleted. This has caused me numerous spurious "overset" errors, where the page is drawn as if there is not room for all the text in a text box even though there is far more than enough room. If the text is copied and pasted into a dumb text-only editor (I use vim for Mac) and then copied and pasted back, the problems disappear.

Meanwhile, in Illustrator, the way elements snap to guides has been changed in a way that makes illustrator somewhat useless to me for creating new content. When dragging an item toward a guide, the element now snaps to the point you are dragging the shape from. That's right, instead of the border of the element snapping to the guide like every other program, and like Illustrator did for years and years, now the drag point snaps to the guide. This means that there is no way to drag two elements to the same guide and line them up. If you want to align elements, you will have to align the first one manually (since snap to guide no longer works properly) and then use the align palette to align subsequent objects to the first one. Snap to grid still works right, but guides can be placed anywhere, but a grid is a grid - so it is no substitute for the original behavior.

What the hell is going on here? Is Adobe trying to make themselves irrelevant? They're getting plenty of help from Free and Open Source software, so I find it a bit confusing as to why they would be trying to blow their own feet off.

People looking for Open Source alternatives to Adobe software might consider the following:

• To replace Photoshop, try GIMP.
• To replace InDesign, try Scribus.
• Illustrator's up-and-coming replacement is called Inkscape.
• Fontographer, schmontographer. Try Fontforge.
• Dreamweaver? There's NVU (cross-platform), Bluefish (Unix/Mac OS X) and Screem (Unix-only, MAY work on OS X.)
• If you just want Free-as-in-beer video editing software, get Avid Free DV. In FOSS land, you could try Cinelerra (or Cinelerra-CV, which is often more current) but that's Linux-only. There's also Kino, which is also Linux-only.
• For frame-by-frame video editing, you should also take a look at Cinepaint, which was formerly FilmGimp, and either way is based on The Gimp.
• Adobe stock photos? Don't make me laugh. If you want free, you can use stock.xchng, a service provided by Stockxpert which in turn is the lowest-cost source for royalty-free images.