Adobe has made amazing strides in the market for page layout software, with InDesign now a real competitor to Quark. Much of this success has been driven by the acceptance of PDF as the preferred file format for transferring artwork. Just as Adobe begin to smile, and graphic designers (even in Europe!) begin to switch their expensive, but very beautiful, Apple Macs to InDesign, Microsoft announces a new document format called Metro. Initially aimed at allowing office documents to be shared easily (and also allowing the same method to be used for describing a document when displaying and printing it), it seems although some pundits are suggesting this is direct competition to PDF, we’re unlikely to see Microsoft making a move on the layout and design software market in the near future.
