Ask Lena: What happened to InBooklet for InDesign

Question

I used to have an InDesign plugin called InBooklet. It was great for putting documents in spreads for the press. Now I can’t find it. What happened to it?

Answer

InBooklet was a plugin created by a company called ALAP (A Lowly Apprentice Production). They did a fantastic job. They did such a good job that no other developing company bothered to compete with them. Adobe had even paid ALAP to help develop the plugin for use with Adobe products like Pagemaker.

On December 13th, 2005 Quark bought ALAP. In March of that following year, InBooklet was discontinued. It seems pretty obvious that Quark wanted to integrate ALAP’s product line into their own and at the same time crippling a stiff competitor.

Meanwhile, InDesign developed their own page spread functionality inside InDesign with the Print Booklet option that appeared in CS3. It doesn’t work the same as InBooklet, but it does work. Where InBooklet allowed you to create a new editable, document in spreads from your working document — the Print Booklet option prints directly to a PDF. Many, many people liked the control of InBooklet, but many other people say that Print Booklet gives them less problems because going to press is more direct.