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

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:.