🚀 go-pugleaf

I am much more familiar with FM than InDesign, but after working with an InDesign trial download for a couple of weeks and reading some comparitive reviews, I have formed some opinions, which may or may not be valuable to you. 

First, the biggest difference between the two, and hence the biggest factor in chosing one over the other, has nothing to do with little idiosyncracies that hamper workflow. Rather, they are very different types of applications that focus upon different types of jobs and different ways of working. 

InDesign is primarily a layout and graphical design application. It's designed much like PageMaker: users are generally expected to create content in another application (word processor) and then import the content into a layout you have already created. When it comes to the design of text--typography--InDesign is very sophisticated. But when it comes to the actual creation and editing of content, it is remarkably weak. For example, its Search And Replace feature lets you search only for text and special characters. You can't search for a style and replace it with a different one, as you can in FrameMaker. You can't search for figures, tables, or special formatting breaks either. Even worse it lacks automatic numbering, bulleted lists, and footnotes. Again, you are expected to create this in a word processor and then import it. 

Despite the fact that FM's UI is ancient, it still offers a unique mix of word processing and long document tools. Corel Ventura offers a better comparison.