Non-scientific poll: Page Layout Software

#1

That would of course be Adobe InDesign.

http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/main.html

http://www.designbyfire.com/andrei.php

Ok... so I'm biased. But I couldn't resist
8^)

Andrei Herasimchuk (http://www.designbyfire.com)

#3

InDesign all the way, If you're using OS X particularly. Quark is good, but the typographic and transparency controls in InDesign win the day. 'CS' is the best version yet.

Its cheaper too!

Jon Hicks (http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/)

#5

So it seems InDesign is the choice to go. How about any books that will help get me on the right course, besides the ones offered in those Google ads to the right :)

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

#7

I've worked in a communication company, and the print-design graphists ( doing some small/medium sized magazines for some companies internal newspaper, ads to be put in magazines and on the bus/metro/streets... ) used Quark express on OS 9 for the page layout and Photoshop ( obviously ) for the purely graphical work.

P01 (http://www.p01.org)

#9

If you've never used Quark, and are familiar with other Adobe products, then InDesign is the best shot -- and it's a truckload cheaper!

Actually, if you're only laying out single pages (rather than a series of pages), Illustrator will do just fine too -- and probably more useful in your day-to-day web work than InDesign would be.

Justin French

#11

Depends. Are you having something printed professionally? Give it to them plaintext with a description or photoshop mockup of what you want. They'd much prefer that than a newbie trying to give them a quark or indesign file, or worse yet publisher or word. It'll cost much less to have them do it than it will to have them *fix* it

If you're printing it yourself, go with publisher or word or whatever you already know. Even photoshop would work. You don't need color separation or any of the other stuff that quark and indesign provide if you're printing it on an inkjet, or even a nice laser printer, and it's a lot smaller learning curve.

Quark and InDesign are *hard* if you've no experience with those sorts of tools. They are the antithesis of web anything.

If you really have some desire to learn them, though (it can't be a career decision, the people that use them don't make that much money, at least up here it's about 25-30K per year, tops) go with indesign, *unless* your local print place doesn't support it and only works with quark. Quark probably has about one version left before it goes away entirely and the two interfaces are quite different, though of course some principle concepts are the same.

If you take it to a print place, regardless of the software you choose (ask them first what format they prefer, and what medium they'd like it on. If you give it to them the way they want, they won't charge extra). And don't do one page per file, it's more work for them, and since most of them have a per-file fee, more expensive for you. Also your pages may not match precisely since they have to do each page seperately instead of all at once.

Be absolutely sure to save whatever fonts you use, no matter how common they are (their arial might be different than yours, which could throw off the layout), and any graphics in very high-res format. And work in CMYK, *not* RGB. And if you have lots of copy, provide a .txt file, too. Spellcheck everything before you give it to them, too.

Oh, and don't expect familiar word processing keyboard shortcuts to work. control+i isn't italics, it's... I don't remember. insert something, I think. At least in indesign. I haven't tried quark in a couple of years. If you're intending to do them legally though, quark would be a total waste of money unless you really intend to become a print designer... you'd never save enough to pay for it in doing your own prepress or even that for clients.

JC (http://www.thelionsweb.com/weblog)

#13

This project will involve multiple pages, but I won't have to send it to press. Something along the lines of what Andy did over at Modulo26 in the sense that I will just need to make a final PDF out of it, but this one will be much larger.

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

#15

Or illustrator or photoshop. Either can export to pdf easily enough.

Of course, if you have acrobat or are using osx, you can make a pdf in any program.

JC (http://www.thelionsweb.com/weblog)

#17

While I'd recommend InDesign too, I used to use Freehand for all my print stuff. Although that isn't it's speciality it handles most print projects (magazines etc) fine, although it lacks features for doing books (no auto-indexing etc). The reason I liked it so much was I could do all my vector stuff (text on paths etc) without swapping apps. And it still has most of what you want for print; multiple page support (somehow I can't find this in Illustrator - I must be stupid), ability to join text boxes and flow, great find and replace, master pages etc.

Then again I used to do all the imposting myself (ie work at the paper size it would be printed at, rather than the final page size) so I might be a little strange ;-) Anyway one vote for Freehand (but yeah personally InDesign over Quark, Pagemaker and *shudder* anything from MS). I really hope that it gets multilingual support soon :/

PS JC is right - print is a whole different kettle of fish. you're very lucky you are preparing for home inkjets!

oli (http://oli.boblet.net/)

#19

The OS will be Windows XP and pretty much it is going to be a book/magazine type of deal. I will look into OpenOffice and Ragtime Solo, but I just figured either InDesign or Quark would be the best route for me to go.

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

#21

I would go with Quark. It's widely supported (every print factory will accept QXD files) - both PC & Mac, easy to use and has many useful features including spellchecking, auto paging etc.

I haven't used version 6 yet though. Version 4 has been great thing.

http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/

dusoft (http://www.ambience.sk)

#23

PageMaker is officially discontinued as of a week or two ago, Jeremy. Adobe is releasing (has released?) a plugin for InDesign to give it a more PageMaker-like interface to let people switch more easily.

And like I said... if you're going to continue using this for a long time and get alot of use out of it, InDesign or Quark, depending on what your printer-of-choice prefers (or more importantly, your wallet). If it's a once-off deal or something you won't be doing often, it's just not worth the investment of time and money. Do it in something you already know and then convert it to pdf using Acrobat if the program you're using can't already output to pdf. (if it's 100+ pages you should probably convert it using acrobat anyway so you can benefit from all the things it can do to reduce filesize)

And yeah, I forgot FreeHand. That's a good one for this sort of thing, too.

JC (http://www.thelionsweb.com/weblog)

#25

From my personal experience of using Quark all the way up to 5 for a few years, then finally switching to Indesign 2 (and currently using CS), I'd have to say from a designer standpoint that Indesign is clearly the superior product. I haven't had the chance to try out Quark 6, which supposedly addressed the problems I had with previous versions (no native multiple undo, no native full resolution previewing, etc.) , but I really haven't had the need to since Indesign fixed those problems a long time ago. Also, since Adobe puts more money into Indesign, updates and improvements are more frequent (which can be good or bad, but for the most part is good). Quark 4 was around for god knows how many years before 5 finally came out. And even then 5 didn't seem all that much of an improvement!

I found the transition relatively painless, too. I learned basic Quark in college, but read a few books (and learned from experience) to get the nuances down. Going to Indesign wasn't that huge of a change. I just needed one book to familiarize myself with the interface and serve as a reference.

Most would argue that Quark is the standard. And they're right. However, that's partly the reason why most people don't switch to Indesign: because it's the standard. There isn't any real reason to stick with it other than that. I work with a few printers, and one of them prefers I give him things in Quark, so I do. I hope that eventually he will prefer Indesign because output collection is a much smoother process with it. The largest printer I work with prefers that I just give them a pdf file, which is a breeze to make in Indesign.

I mostly use Indesign for laying out books (200 page Japanese manga books, to be exact). For the one page layouts I use Illustrator most of the time.

Chris McDougall

#27

I've used Quark 4.1 and 5.01 on Windows XP, InDesign 2 for Windows XP, and Quark 4.1 and InDesign 2 on Mac OS 9.

I prefer Quark, but not by much. InDesign reminds me of a cross between QuarkXPress and Adobe Illustrator.

Either way, if you're doing as many pages as you're saying, learn about Master Pages. It'll save you as much time in Print Design as web standards do in Web Design... and they're a lot more predictable. =)

Ryan Parman (http://www.skyzyx.com)

#29

My tuppence worth...I've just being trying InDesign lately (Adobe trial download) and as a newbie to Page Layout software I have to say I've found InDesign extremely easy to pick up - especially if you have experience with Photoshop - everything is where you intuitively (form a Photoshop point of view) expect it to be and its very quick to knock up some good looking stuff with a learning curve that in't too demanding for software that can do so much.

Chris (http://www.lineages.co.uk/chris/)