Unclear if Illustrator or InDesign should be used - advice needed

Question

Hi,
I've been using Illustrator for 10+ years to design my companies brochures, logos, business cards, forms, advertisements, instruction manuals, etc.  LOTS of stuff.  Lately it's been bothering me that I have so much duplicated content spread across many .ai files, for example let's say we have 20 different usual manuals.  Currently they are all saved as .ai files and if I want to change an element that is present in ALL the files I need to edit each one.  This is not a smart way to work, I know this.  I have tested "placing" ai files but that has created some problems as well.
I'm wondering if InDesign is what I should be using for creating and managing assets like this?  Rather than download and install the trial and learn the basics, I thought I would first ask what the community thinks.
To ask my question in a simpler way: Which is more appropriate for designing instruction and user manuals, InDesign or Illustrator?
Thank you for any guidance you can offer.
-Steve

Answer 1

I'm assuming that InDesign will also support some sort of "linked" workflow where I can "place" or "include" an ai file in 20 different InDesign files and if I update the AI file I will see the changes in all the InDesign files.  In other words it will reload or pull in the changes automatically when it loads.
Everyone has told you that it will do this - but they all are referring to logos, not actual text content. I think that you intend to do the updates to text content this way, as well. It'll work, of course, but the efficacy is going to depend on your ability to keep track of which .ai files contain the "master content." There are other ways to do this that are more ID-centric, like storing your content in a database that spits out XML, which you then flow into your ID document.
That will take a lot longer to set up & understand, and it might not pay off for you to do all that work, since you already have all of your content in Illy.  However, I think it's best to know what the best methods are, so you can know exactly what you're losing out on by using a less flexible method. I work in a translation firm, and whenever I get an InDesign doc that just has text-laden .ai files placed therein, I always bill high. It's about 3x as much work to localize an Illustrator file, when compared to an identical layout in InDesign.
So, if I was asked by your organization to make a plan for you as a workflow consultant, I'd tell you to go through with your plan of using Illustrator content placed in ID, with instructions to get used to the tools in ID so that a nice, slow, easy migration of text content out of Illustrator could take place at some point in the future.
(Lastly, look at the Preferences in InDesign; under "File Handling" there are some options like "Check links before opening document" and "Find missing links before opening document." Those prefs will be very important for your workflow...)