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InDesign and Illustrator
Adobe would want you to have the whole Creative Suite application. In their idealised world they see InDesign as a layout and type application, with Illustrator and Photoshop contributing objects as necessary. As Photoshop and Illustrator files are placeable and linkable natively, the workflow is fairly smooth, i.e. control-click on a placed object gives you the ability to launch that object in the relevant application, edit it, save and close and go back to InDesign where the image is automatically updated.
Other benefits of InDesign is the printing/export tools are more refined, and the pre-press aspects are more useable, i.e. separation preview is available. Also there is another little known benefit. You can place a DCS-2 file with spot colours in an InDesign document and output a composite PDF file with full resolution images that are properly seperable by a RIP. There is no other environment that I know of that will allow you to do this with a DCS-2 file out of the box, i.e. with no tricky plug-ins.
I worked in Packaging and no way would we have ever created a design in InDesign because each design was (usually) a single document, a one-off. Magazine, newspaper, etc. publishing is a different story, InDesign a much better tool there. I ditched Quark long ago, haven't used it since version 4.
Also I have to say that a graphics-rich InDesign document will have 10s or even 100s of linked objects. That can lead to confusion, the beauty of an Illustrator document is that everything bar images are native objects in their own right, making a much cleaner file. Even images can be easily embedded (although not good practice in my view). The type tools in Illustrator are almost as good as InDesign, just missing advanced composing tools so for the majority of single-document designs you would not gain much by using InDesign.
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