It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, books and ebooks.

(Freehand, Aldus's competitor to Adobe Illustrator, was licensed from Altsys, the maker of Fontographer.)

In 1999, Quark announced its offer to buy Adobe[3] and to divest the combined company of PageMaker to avoid problems under United States antitrust law.

To support the new features, especially typography, introduced with InDesign CS, the program and its document format are not backward-compatible.

Instead, InDesign CS2 introduced the INX (.inx) format, an XML-based document representation, to allow backward compatibility with future versions.

It does not provide any editing client; rather, it is for use by developers in creating client-server solutions with the InDesign plug-in technology.