Comment by wink
4 days ago
Never been in that professional area but around 2000 InDesign (on Windows) was probably the 2nd name you had heard after QuarkXPress.
I mean I can't really speak with authority how much that (first IIRC) version of InDesign differed from this K2 or PageMaker but I think it was working well with Photoshop and ImageReady (both of which I knew from work before).
Would probably depend on how much it was more of a v2 or how much was a complete rewrite.
I lived through the whole thing. Aldus Pagemaker was king for a long while, then Quark came along, then Adobe bought Aldus to get their nascent PageMaker replacement (codenamed K2), dethroning Quark.
There were a lot of other programs along the way, esp. if you consider platforms other than Mac OS (and later Windows).
I still think someone needs to create an office suite which just used .md and .csv and similar plain-text source files for file formats, then all design variations are done via theming --- then, when it's time to produce a document professionally, what is provided is a clear plain text file with sensible markup which is easily converted into pretty much anything.