InDesign vs Illustrator. Say no to PDF in Illustrator!

Illustrator and PDF Document

PDF document cannot be effectively built in Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is built for vector images and graphic design. Vector images and graphics are made of points, lines, shapes, and curves based on mathematical formulas rather than a set amount of pixels, and therefore can be scaled up or down while maintaining image quality. However, when it comes to PDF document where we work mostly with "Text" Illustrator lacks several features.

Not ideal for PDF documents because of the following:

• Manual work of styling every single heading, subheading and paragraph style.
• Page layout cannot be globally set, every single page has to copy the design and if something changes we have to manually change it everywhere.
• Table of contents page have to be manually built and links to different section of the document cannot be included.
• Exporting PDF pages cannot be done as a single PDF document. Every page has to be exported individually and then combined. This is crazy amount of work if your PDF document has large number of pages.

InDesign and PDF Document

Adobe InDesign is built for creating books, magazines, and brochures, as well as print and digital publications. InDesign is much more suitable for building PDF documents.

Benefits of InDesign while creating a PDF document:

• Common components such as heading, subheading and paragraph style can be configured in one place.
• Common page layouts can be defined in one place and applied in multiple pages with click of a button.
• Table of contents can be auto-generated based on components that we define.
• Links to different parts of the document can be added.
• Exporting document will also preserve all pages and their positioning.

Conclusion

Use Illustrator for designing shapes and not for text related document, instead use InDesign for text based document. For simple text based design which consist of 1 or 2 pages Illustrator still can be a good choice but InDesign specialise in creating publications which makes it an ideal choice for text based documents.