What Software/Platform for Print Publishing? 23
Howzer asks: "What's the deal with publishing these days? I remember clearly the old Quark vs Pagemaker wars, the winner being Quark, on a Mac, end of argument. But that was the late 90s. These days the three products I seem to be hearing about are Quark, Publisher, and InDesign. I'd love to get some opinions on platform/software and the current state of play, as it seems I may have to have an opinion on this soon. I thank you, the designers who'll soon be working for us thank you, and the people who'll be reading our 120 page glossy monthly magazine thank you." What publishing software gives you the best performance and features for the money?
InDesign User (Score:4, Informative)
I use InDesign, but I have to admit that I can't compare it to the other ones because I've not used versions of them more recent than 10 years ago.
Things I like about InDesign:
What I don't like:
Overall, I think it's a great program. And it's highly extensible, but any non-trivial extentions (e.g. good footnoting) are v. expensive.
Re:Another (HAPPY) InDesign User (Score:3, Informative)
I've now done several 60 page full-color books and smaller greyscale stuff with InDesign and love it.
I agree with the Word styles, they are a pain and mess things up more than help; I demand all text as rtf or plain text now. The compos
The answer: (Score:2)
Scribus on X (Score:4, Interesting)
Save yourself over $2k, compile Scribus in *BSD or Linux.
Quark on a Mac (Score:1)
Publisher? Be serious.
Adobe? Better, but still not quite there.
Quark? Horrible. But its better than the others. As sad as that is.
I used to work at a place that did all their stuff in Word, then exported it all to PDF. Talk about a nightmare. Then they hired a 'graphic artist' who moved everything to Publisher. Not much better. Later on they hired another girl who used Adobe. Quite a bit better, but still not quite it.
Guess who's stuck doing everything now, in Quark on a blue G3?
Me.
Re:Quark on a Mac (Score:2, Informative)
1. FrameMaker, for technical manuals. Don't use this.
2. PageMaker, obsolete. Don't use this either, but it might be what your girl was using.
3. InDesign, Adobe's flagship publishing product. Probably the best out there. Definitely feels better than Quark to me.
Re:Quark on a Mac (Score:1)
You think?
'Quark' isn't a product either. Quark is a company.
I just didn't feel like typing out QuarkXpress and Adobe InDesign.
*sigh*
Re:Quark on a Mac (Score:1)
latex (Score:4, Informative)
Someone has to mention it sooner or later, and it might as well be me: LaTeX [latex-project.org]!
I've been using latex for a few months, including writing a research paper. Placement of figures can be a pain, but for text it is reasonably intuitive. All the formatting trivia is abstracted away, and you can concentrate on just writing. It's math features are nice, too, if you need them.
-jim
My Experience (Score:2, Insightful)
My humble input is as follows:
1) The Mac or PC issue - all of the applications in professional use are feature identical between the platforms.
2) The performance angle - sure a Mac can beat a PC on the Unsharp Mask filter (but for $1000-2000 more), and it really isn't a significan portion of anyone's day. Save yourself a buck (or $2000) and buy a PC.
3) Which Application - Quark was the superior program for many years, but they killed themselves by not coming o
Re:My Experience (Score:1)
We will take Pub files, and can actually output them now (MS made some serious improvements), but it is solely for the home user - no professional would attempt to use it to create ANY document.
The Lowdown (Score:5, Informative)
First - TIME IS MONEY.
Don't waste time dicking around with "free" software to try and save some money, I don't care what anyone says.
GIMP is nowhere near as good as Photoshop *for the kind of tasks you will be using it for*
Quark 6.0 is shite, Quark 6.1 is making inroads in getting back up on it's throne, but I think it's too little, too late. If you already have a substantial investment in Quark, then upgrading to 6.1 is not such a bad idea, however if you're setting up from scratch, forget it.
Get a PowerMac G5, Dual CPU if possible, and a nice monitor - DO NOT skimp on the monitor, you will have problems with clarity and colour.
Get the Adobe Creative Suite - Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat. You're essentially paying for Photoshop and InDesign and getting Illustrator and Acrobat for free.
I personally prefer Macromedia FreeHand, but I'm in the minority there - if you're doing any web based design, however, Macromedia Studio MX 2004 is excellent. Once again, you save money over getting the individual components and Dreamweaver (IMHO) is better than GoLive.
Get a two button mouse, like a Microsoft Intellimouse Optical. Don't skimp on the mouse, it's like getting a BMW and then whacking a steering-wheel on it held together by gaffer tape.
If you're getting multiple machines, get a half-decent machine as the server (Quicksilver or Mirror Drive Doors G4 or higher) and use some fast disks in it. RAID if possible. BACK IT UP.
AIT or LTO are good, if expensive, tape options, but worth every cent when you recover that file you've been working on for a whole week that you deleted.
You can do similar work on a PC, but when you go to output the files to film or plate, people will look at you funny and assume you don't know what you're doing if the files came from a PC.
Last, but not least, Fonts.
Piracy on fonts is now being treated like piracy on software. Fonts aren't too expensive, if you're paying for your software, you can afford fonts too. Less is more with fonts, don't use too many! Also, get the "brand name" versions of fonts, not the cheap knockoffs. It will look better, they will work reliably and have proper kerning tables and things like that.
k:.
Thought of one who works for a Quick Printer (Score:1)
Re:Thought of one who works for a Quick Printer (Score:2, Interesting)
OK short story is that I've used Mac, Linux, NeXtstep(OPENSTEP), and Windows... and Used various programs from Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe Framemaker for NeXT, Create, Gimp, TeX, Quark, Adobe Pagemaker 5 on (to now 7), InDesign 1.5 on... Coral Draw, Freehand, Illustrator, Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop and Publisher since 95 AND working in a print shop as it's graphic artist for the last 8 years I've come to a few conclusions.
Quark is over-priced, over-buggy, and over-outdate
Here's what we looked at (Score:4, Informative)
Platform: We had designers who were fluent in the Mac world and only slightly less fluent in the PC world. One thing we decided at the outset was that religious wars wouldn't be tolerated in the decisionmaking process -- we paid people to design and to be technically competent enough to pick up a new OS if they needed to, not to evangelize.
We ended up deciding on PCs for a variety of reasons specific to our operation (I won't bore you with those), but the common reason boiled down to simple customer service: We surveyed our clients and vendors (in that order of priority). Most clients were on PCs and were more comfortable with PCs, so that's what we aligned ourselves with.
* Program: For us, the comparative process came down to questions of:
- What would allow us to optimize our workflow? Time is money, and so we looked at our workflow (both overall and client-specific) and developed a checklist of what our must-haves were.
- What would cost the least overall? Purchase price is *not* the major cost of the software decision -- for us, we factored in what downtime would cost, what the value-over-time of the warranty and tech-support policies were, etc.
- Where was the software in its life cycle? Simply put, we wanted to get a product in the "sweet spot" that was past version 1.x and not yet near the end of its life. This question pretty much eliminated Pagemaker for us -- a product that has been repositioned and kluged to death.
Ultimately, we looked at Framemaker (too geared to technical publishing) Quark 5.x, Quark 6.x and Adobe InDesign. We settled on Quark 5.x and stuck with it past the introduction of 6.x because of stability issues. We have one publication running on InDesign, with an anticipated 12-18 month cycle for migrating over. We'll probably always have at least one Quark installation because some clients just refuse to switch.Hope this helps!
General Thanks (Score:2)
I particularly appreciate those who really took the time and sketched out their experiences, as that's just gold. Key points mentioned several times above include taking note of the existing user proficiencies, client machines, and film machines. We'll defn. be taking those into account.
One word on "that sentence" in my original submission: I was in no way hinting at platform wars or stating my personal preferences. I was just reflecting what had been said to me countless times
Aslo a "skill factor" (Score:1)
Are you any good? Have you got experience with magazines and newspapers?
Like most applications now adays both Quark and InDesign comes with a lot more possibilities than required for the normal user. So if you're not really pro and creative, you won't need many of the features.
I use Quark at my daily work in a norwegian newspaper, and we don't really need more than quark 4.11! I have tried quark 5 and 6, and they are better, but mostly I don't need the new features.
F
Check with your printer.Quark 5 on Windows is okay (Score:1, Informative)
Check with your printer.
I see no cost-justifiable reason to upgrade from Quark 4 to Quark 5 in my experience, except for the old 'compatibility' bugaboo.
Most of these prog