What Software/Platform for Print Publishing?

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?

Comments

InDesign User

[dghcasp]

I guess someone should speak up in this thread.

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:

• The multi-line justifier: Justifies whole paragraphs instead of one line at a time, leading to a better overall colour.
• Full support for OpenType, and optical kerning.
• Automatic hanging of horizontal text strokes outside the margins (optional.)

What I don't like:

• Hanging of strokes is per-frame attribute, not a paragraph style attribute.
• Composing support is lousy. It's better in InDesign CS than in InDesign 2 because they now have the ability to edit your copy in a plain-text window (think Textedit style.) But really, the easiest way to compose copy is in MS-Word.
• Support for MS-Word import could be a bit better. Even if you use styles in Word, you still have tons of word-crap-styles (bold is not a style, it's an attribute dammit) that you have to fix in InDesign. It'd be nice if they had a "load new paragraph styles over existing ones" instead of having to do it manually.
• Indexing uses too many dialog boxes IMHO. But that's a minor point.
• Annoying methods for doing auto-numbering and bulleting (i.e. do them in word.)
• Footnote support sucks.

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.

latex

[j1m 5n0w]

Someone has to mention it sooner or later, and it might as well be me: LaTeX!

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

The Lowdown

[PhunkySchtuff]

Right, I set up these kinds of networks for a living, so I suppose I'm qualified to speak about it...
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:.

Re:Quark on a Mac

[SiMac]

"Adobe" is not a program. Adobe is a company. Adobe makes three software products that deal with publishing:

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:Another (HAPPY) InDesign User

[teamhasnoi]

I used Pagemaker to do a 500+ page catalog, and some other smaller publications (greyscale only) - then when OS X came out and Adobe had basically killed support for it except under classic (ugh), I made the big leap to the only thing that was supported by OS X - InDesign.

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 composing is not as good as Pagemaker's as well.

Problems I had with pagemaker are gone: The dreaded 'bad index file', crashes and lockups.

I can't really speak to indexing and footnotes as I haven't had reason to use them as of yet, but I couldn't see using anything other than InDesign.

Here's what we looked at

[gregwbrooks]

We run a graphic design shop that specializes in editorial design, so we faced a lot of the same issues you're probably looking at. For us, the decision came down to:

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!

Check with your printer.Quark 5 on Windows is okay

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Quark 5 on Windows at my current gig, used to use Quark 4 on Mac OS 9. I'm OS-Agnostic, but we have found that printers we deal with prefer Mac, as they claim the font metrics are more precise, i.e. for a long book, you won't have a surprise that causes you to have to add one page, which has been known to happen on Windows Quark.

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 programs have a million unused features... if only I could trade features for stability!

Mac OS-X Quark 6.0 was rather unstable, the people I know who use it are glad they kept 5.0 installed!

I like Freehand for logo design, but everyone I know uses Illustrator. Illustrator has a harsher learning curve, with rather annoyingly abstract error messages that you need a manual to understand.

We tried Adobe InDesign, very slow, a bit too much of everything. Honestly, I don't use many of the new features in either Quark or Photoshop, I'd be happy with versions about 3 years old for both of them except for photoshop's "save-to-web' feature.

It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools, and most good designers can do great work with old software, sometimes it's easier... unless they just graduated from a school with "the latest software", they probably have experience with older versions.

One of our printers calls pagemaker "PageFaker" he despises it and the people who use it, but probably for reasons that come from situations he experienced a long time ago, they may no longer be valid assumptions.

NOTE: Two monitors is a major production speed improvement, you can have the menu clutter on one screen and the design on the other, so you aren't constantly moving stuff around to see what you're doing. I'd rather forgo a software upgrade and get annother monitor/video card.