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> Forgot one important thing: The typographic engine is superb.
> Text simply looks better. You can even choose optical
> alignment and the paragraph composer consider a whole
> paragraph to determine spacing and hyphenation.
Yes, I agree. AFAIK, InDesign's implementation of a Knuth-Plass-like
linebreaking algorithm is only the second (or third) commercial
implementation since Knuth & Plass published their paper (the first one
being Digital Publishing Systems in England, if memory serves me right).
It may also have been implemented in the Penta system, but recent
communication with the current owner of the Penta source code suggests
that it is not applied per default on paragraphs, but only invoked on
"problem paragraphs".
The *really* interesting thing is how Adobe's algorithm differs from the
Knuth-Plass algorithm. It must differ, since Adobe has managed to patent
its algorithm (6,510,441).
There's also the "Breakers" plugin to QuarkXPress that overrides Quark's
own line-based algorithm and applies a Knuth-Plass-like paragraph-based
linebreaking algorithm on the text.
As you point out, what would be really nice in ID are more features
supporting long documents (since FM is likely to disappear anyway,
sooner or later), like autonumbered sections (using Frame's model),
running headers/footers, dictionary-style headers, crossreferences, a
better implementation of unordered/ordered lists etc.
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