• Indesign
• Adobe Indesign Alternative For Mac

For professional-grade layout software for print, the only free one that comes close is Scribus.

For Illustrator, the alternative would be InkScape.

How to Use Alternative for InDesign to Edit PDF PDFelement Express for Mac is the best alternative to InDesign to edit PDF files. As the name of the program indicates, it is a wonderful program to edit PDF files in any possible way or manage PDF pages in various ways. Note: To use the new InDesign Touch workspace, you must have a touch screen enabled tablet/monitor running Windows 10 or above (such as Microsoft Surface Pro 3) with the screen resolution set to 2160 x 1440 or more. InDesign documents don't have a color mode—you can have a mix of RGB, Lab, or CMYK colors on the same page. If you turn on Overprint Preview RGB and Lab process colors will display as they will print on a CMYK device, using the document's CMYK profile for the soft proof.

Dont even get into the beginners' free alternatives like Canva. As a professional printer (HP Indigo 7600 with DFE and Komori Lithrone 429 2013 with Screen CTP), it gives me such pain to fix and manage files from newbie design apps. I mean those are fine but dont expect proper colors and borders. Bleed, separations, and such are very important. So are technicalities such as outlines, transparencies, element borders, spots, rich blacks, and even color profiles.

We had yesterday a client who wanted their print in 1-color Black with a PDF from Canva. Not only was the conversion to black and white somehow quirky but the transparency effect they used didnt work with our autonatic bleed maker that mirrored the file since somehow the colors were off too. Opening the file in Photoshop resulted in a weird crop. Converting the file in Acrobat Pro wouldnt yield a consistent result. I had to put the file into InDesign, make a Postscript file, then distill it before I was able to properly process the file.

All because Canva did somethinf non-print standard to the file.

Save yourself and your printer the trouble and stick to professional-grade software or in an Adobe ecosystem. If you will go with a non-Adobe program, make sure to run your PDF/postscript thru Acrobat Distiller in Press-Quality preset to 'print standardize' the file. You might see changes like text going missing and images getting corrupted which means the original PDF was malformed. If that file went into printing directly, well, bad things will happen. Printers like us often dont 'redistill' the file since it takes a while and some unnecessary conversions may happen so we only do it to special cases.

Indesign

Adobe Indesign Alternative For Mac

Again save yourself and your printer the trouble and buy at least Acrobat Distiller. You can also use an old version of Indesign like CS4-CS6. We stuck with CS2 until CS5 came out then migrated to CS3 because of a sale. Then just recently migrated to CS6 because of software sale in a local store and due to our plug-ins requiring at least CS6 now.