LaTeX vs InDesign

I think it’s fair to say that Adobe’s InDesign is the standard publishing tool for RPGs, or at least the most common among the most well-known RPGs. However, it’s clearly inappropriate for BIND.

BIND’s all about working together on an open project, but InDesign is geared to limit that openness.

Cash

In order to use InDesign, one has to:

1. Have Windows or OSX (both of which cost a fair amount of cash),
2. sign up for a monthly subscription (more cash!),
3. agree to never work with countries deemed unfriendly to the USA (or Adobe will flat-out ban you, even if you have a licence).

No Git

Currently, anyone can download all of the BIND books from Gitlab (or Github, or my own git server, et c.) but an Adobe book would require its own site, with its own hosting. The InDesign file-format doesn’t allow for people to make myriad concurrent versions, then make one of them a proposal, and seamlessly send those changes back into every other proposal.

No Guarantees

Adobe products aren’t always backwards compatible - old project files may not open properly. BIND began over ten years ago, and may go on for another ten or twenty. Development may pause at any moment while I take a break (as I have done, sometimes for years). That’s not something Adobe guarantees.

LaTeX, on the other hand, remains as stable as a crocodile. It existed before the language ‘C’, and you can take any TeX document from the 70’s, and compile it today, and you will know for certain that it will produce exactly the same output as the author intended.

Zero Interface Choice

LaTeX has many interfaces to choose from, while Adobe products resist the very concept of people being able to select an interface.

No Automation

And, of course, no Adobe product can begin to rival the levels of automation which LaTeX allows.

A Note on Learning Curves

A lot of people have fallen victim to the meme that LaTeX has a ‘steep learning curve’. But this makes no sense when working with a team where someone else is doing the LaTeX. Just as people writing for an InDesign-based project can just write in plain-text and hand it over to someone else to do the formatting, everyone working in a LaTeX project can just write in Notepad or whatever and leave the formatting to someone else.

Or, if we want to compare a solo-workflow, the difference soon vanish in a different way. InDesign takes years to learn properly, just like any professional layout tool. If LaTeX demands an extra hour to adjust page margins then this means nothing in the long-term. In the long term, I don’t know how the two compare, and I doubt anyone else can say for sure.