United States antitrust law
InDesign is the successor to Adobe PageMaker, which Adobe acquired by buying Aldus Corporation in late 1994. (Freehand, Aldus's competitor to Adobe Illustrator, was sold to Altsys, the maker of Fontographer.) By 1998 PageMaker had lost much of professional market to the comparatively feature-rich QuarkXPress version 3.3, released in 1992, and version 4.0, released in 1996. In 1999, Quark announced its offer to buy Adobe and to divest the combined company of PageMaker to avoid problems under United States antitrust law. Adobe rebuffed Quark's offer and continued to develop a new desktop publishing application. Aldus had begun developing a successor to PageMaker, which was code-named "Shuksan". Later, Adobe code-named the project "K2", and Adobe released InDesign 1.0 in 1999.