InDesign has a reputation as the thing you graduate to when you are serious. That was true when the alternative was a Word mail-merge with a clip-art cover. It is not a useful rule now, because the jobs have split: one tool family composes pages as artwork, the other typesets a manuscript onto pages. Most self-published books are the second job.
What InDesign is actually for
Adobe InDesign is a layout application. You place frames on a pasteboard and put type, images and rules inside them. Master pages, baseline grids, optical margin alignment, GREP styles, anchored objects — it is an extraordinary piece of software for anything whose pages are not all the same.
That is the tell. If every spread of your book could be described as "body text in a single column, headings in a hierarchy, an image where the manuscript puts one", you are not using the features that justify the tool. You are using it as a very expensive way to set margins.
When you do need it
- Illustrated books where images wrap, overlap, or have to sit in a specific spot on a specific page — picture books, art catalogues, some cookbooks.
- Magazines, reports, pitch decks that are designed spread by spread rather than generated from text.
- Complex print production — a printer who has given you a six-page spec for bleed, slug, colour profiles and a spine width calculated to the tenth of a millimetre, and who expects an InDesign package or a PDF/X from one.
- A designer is already in InDesign and the manuscript is going to them. Then the format they asked for is the format you send. This is a collaboration fact, not a typesetting one.
If none of those apply, InDesign is optional. Plenty of excellent books have never been near it.
What you pay, in money and in time
| InDesign | Word / Google Docs | Markdown + typesetter | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Adobe subscription | Often already paid for | Free through paid, no suite |
| Learning curve | Weeks to be competent | You already know it | An afternoon for the page rules |
| Revising chapter 4 | Reflow by hand, watch the overflows | Easy to edit, ugly to export | Edit the text, re-export |
| EPUB | Possible, often a second project | Poor | The same manuscript |
| Control of the page | Total | Almost none | The controls a book needs |
| Collaboration with an editor | Awkward — it is not a writing tool | Excellent | The Markdown file, or a Doc for the draft |
The revision row is the one that decides it for anyone who has finished a book once and then had to change it. In a layout file, a two-paragraph insert in chapter two overflows a text frame, which pushes an image, which leaves a hole on page forty. In a manuscript-plus-rules setup, the same insert is a reflow, and the page rules do it again in seconds. That is not a small difference over a 200-page book you will proof three times.
The middle tools people try first
Vellum (Mac, novels), Atticus, Reedsy Book Editor, Affinity Publisher, Canva. Each occupies a different point on the canvas-versus-rules spectrum. Vellum and Atticus are closer to typesetting a manuscript; Affinity is InDesign without the subscription; Canva is a graphics tool that happens to have an A4 preset, and it will fight you past about twenty pages.
Pandoc with a LaTeX engine is the other serious answer, and it produces pages InDesign users respect. The cost is that visual changes are made in a template language — where that stops being pragmatic.
A reasonable decision rule
- If a designer or a printer has specified InDesign, use InDesign.
- If the page is a poster that happens to have several sisters, use a layout application (InDesign or Affinity).
- If the book is words in a sequence, with headings, the occasional table or figure, and a cover made separately — do not open InDesign to typeset it.
- If you already own InDesign and like it, ignore this article. The tool you will actually finish in is the right tool.
Self-publishing is a production pipeline, not a membership of a software tribe. The pipeline from a Markdown draft does not have an InDesign-shaped hole in it unless you put one there.
Where bukpress sits
bukpress is the rules side of that split. You write Markdown; type, margins, paper, page numbers and covers are controls; the preview paginates with the export. It will not wrap text around a floated illustration or pin a caption to a spot on page four, and it exports A4, so a specific trade-paperback trim is not something it sets. If those are the requirements, you are in layout-application territory and you should be.
If they are not — if the job is a book that looks like a book and can be regenerated when chapter four changes — a canvas is the long way round.