IF YOU'RE into desktop publishing, you've probably wondered why a lot of the features that seem commonsensical to you aren't available in the leading software packages.

Previously, designers had to choose between frame-based and more free-form layout applications, enduring each extreme's limitations. With the release of its InDesign solution, however, Adobe Systems Inc. claims to give creative designers greater flexibility while adding features superior to its best-selling PageMaker product.

''PageMaker will not go away. Instead, it will remain targeted at the market where it is strongest, which is business users, whereas InDesign will be more for free-form designers. Choosing InDesign over PageMaker depends on how much creative control you exercise over your design project, so that it is suited to the needs of magazine publishers but not so much to newspapers,'' said Tim Cole, Adobe's evangelist for Publishing Products.

Convenience

Looking at some of InDesign's features, graphics designers may find themselves asking why on earth Adobe never thought of making life more convenient for them before.

Any graphics designer would tell you that one of the biggest headaches in desktop publishing is the need to convert graphics formats before you could work on them in PageMaker. For example, Illustrator uses .AI as its typical file format extension, while Photoshop uses .PSD. Typically, a user would have to convert these graphics to a flattened TIFF file to work on them in PageMaker.

Instead, InDesign allows you to import Illustrator and Photoshop files into PageMaker in their native formats. Not only does this save precious time but also storage space, since you don't need to keep saving multiple copies that weigh about a ton each--while also preventing stress and possible suicidal tendencies among harassed and frustrated graphics artists.

Cole also demonstrated InDesign's two nifty solutions for line composition, dubbing them the ''stupid'' and ''smart'' composition engines. The stupid one isn't that bad because it does what all the other solutions do now, which is single-line composition. If this sounds geek to you, try laying out sample text in PageMaker and try to ''justify'' the alignment of the copy. You'll suffer an anxiety attack when some short words, or even a single punctuation mark, sometimes get stretched to fill out the line. Also, though most would rather die than admit this in public, graphics designers sometimes resort to manually breaking a line to balance the spacing, or to fix the text wrap on a graphics insertion.

Multiline composer

''You graphics designers just love manually breaking up lines, don't you, because after painstakingly doing this and just barely beating the deadline, that's exactly when copy boys hand you the revised page copy. Sometimes, they die,'' Cole quipped, to the crowd's merriment.

Instead, InDesign's smart composition engine is an evolutionary multiline composer. Rather than examining each line in isolation, this tool views the lines as a text unit and assesses penalties on different copy no-nos, such as hyphenation and erratic spacing. Afterward, the multiline composer chooses the text combination the least flagged penalties, so that theoretically, at least, you always get more esthetically pleasing copy.

System upgrade

Of course, InDesign's features don't come without drawbacks, one of which is the higher desktop system requirement compared to PageMaker or the competing QuarkXPress layout solutions. For the Macintosh version, you would need a PowerPC 604 or faster processor, though a PowerPC G3 is recommended, while a Pentium II 300 MHz or faster is recommended for the PC.

''If you are using low-end computers, my advice is that you stay with your current product until you can upgrade to a higher-end machine,'' Cole said.

Would publishing companies, however, really consider InDesign worth the investment in system upgrades?