Quark or Adobe?

[Chris Passeno]

I think that you'll find that as printers upgrade, they will be switching to an Adobe PDF workflow.  That also means that InDesign will be the primary.

That being said, they will always be able to take Quark files.  Quark was a lot of money when printers started taking files from customers and turning it into a easy workflow.  Hell, it still is a lot of money.  They have a lot of money and time invested in that workflow and hate to loose that investment when they upgrade.

That being said.  Time is money.  The learning curve on Quark is much higher than InDesign.

[Matt Gwinn]

I'm feeling way out of date here as I'm using Pagemaker for all my layout.  How much better is InDesign?  How similar are they?


If price is an issue, these are the retail prices

Pagemaker 7.0  $499
Indesign CS2 - $699
Quark Xpress 6.0 - $699

You  can likely find them cheeper if you look around.

,Matt

[MatrixGamer]

The last time I spoke with printers they seemed open to Pagemaker as well as InDesign. Programs get aged out but Pagemaker has not been aged out yet. If you are sending the file to the printer as a PDF then it won't matter what it was made on - at least I think it wouldn't.

When it come to making a pretty book either of the programs mentioned can do it. Learn one and get good with it and be ready to make mistakes. You always spot 20 errors as soon as you get the book back from the printer!

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[timfire]

The last time I spoke with printers they seemed open to Pagemaker as well as InDesign. Programs get aged out but Pagemaker has not been aged out yet.

Pagemaker may not be "aged out" yet, but it's on its way. Adobe has stopped development for the program. It is my understanding that they are trying to it phase out in favor of Indesign. I believe that was the purpose of the Indesign Pagemaker edition.

For the time being Pagemaker is still useful right now, but I would go with Indesign for long-term use.

[Matt Gwinn]

Pagemaker may not be "aged out" yet, but it's on its way. Adobe has stopped development for the program. It is my understanding that they are trying to it phase out in favor of Indesign. I believe that was the purpose of the Indesign Pagemaker edition.

When check prices at Adobe's web site they tried to push InDesign on me when I went to the Pagemaker order page, so I think you are correct there.

,Matt