Story editor (Project)

user contributed use cases

john jason:

Adobe initially targeted InDesign at QuarkXPress users. QuarkXPress
never had a story editor, so version 1.0 of InDesign came with no story
editor. Eventually Adobe learned that lack of a story editor was
costing them sales of InDesign to PageMaker users, as PageMaker had
always had a story editor. Finally, in InDesign CS (or maybe it was
2.0) Adobe added a story editor to InDesign.

Prior to going to InDesign I had used both PageMaker and QuarkXPress. I
never much missed the story editor in InDesign, but when it finally
appeared I found it occasionally useful. Suppose you have a story
threaded through 20 frames on 20 pages. To edit the entire story in
canvas view means you have to select a frame, do your editing, move
down a page, select a frame, do your editing, and on and on. If you
have a story editor you can edit the entire story all at once in one
window. 

But to be efficient, the story editor needs to have all the features
that are available in canvas view. That means the fonts have to appear
the same - no more generic font for the story editor. And if you insert
a glyph that does not exist in the font, no more faking it in the story
editor. 

I use 1.3.9 and I still use the story editor a lot. I don't have a lot
of long stories, but I do have long documents. Editing in canvas view
is frequently painfully slow. But when the long document slowness is
finally fixed I can do without the story editor quite easily. I'd
rather we spent our development efforts on something more critical.