Composing Documents

[Ted E. Childers]

I'm curious to know what sort of desktop publishing software the members of the Forge use to compose and layout their documents/books.

Although I consider myself proficient in the advanced features of Microsoft Word, I feel that it's not the best for laying out finished products with proper layouts. Microsoft Publisher is easy enough for doing layouts, but I've heard from a printing press friend of mine that he hates dealing with Publisher documents (something to do with coloring). I have a copy of Framemaker, but it's such a beast to use.

Does anyone recommend another program? I know most folks convert their documents to PDF in Adobe Acrobat. What I'm interested in learning is alternatives for doing layouts and design.

Thanks!

- Ted (previously Awesomizer)

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Ted,

I can't recommend Serif PagePlus 8 PDF enough. Even with the awkward name, it's the best program I've seen at a decent price to do this stuff. It's got basically the same layout capabilities as PageMaker, a built-in word processor very like Word, but with better - in my opinion - implementation of styles, full table of contents and indexing features, and makes PDFs. And it's less than $120.

I sound like a salesman, I know, but I was massively impressed with this product.

[Jonathan Walton]

Personally, I've been taking classes in design recently and have fallen in love with Adobe InDesign 1.5, which is the best layout tool I've ever used (and is custom made for making PDFs, since it's an Adobe product).  It can suck the content right out of Word documents too, without any problems.

I hear from others that the new InDesign 2.0 is even better, but I haven't used it myself yet.  Still, it runs over $500 if you buy a new copy and doesn't come in any sort of stripped down version.  I only get the pleasure of using it because my college bought a site liscense.  Once I graduate, I'll have to buy my own copy of the thing.  Grrr...

[Adam]

InDesign 2.0 is miles, miles better than InDesign 1.5. However, be careful with the updates; 2.0.1 was fine, but someone at Adobe was smoking fine crack when they 'tested' the 2.0.2 update. Among other things, on my system it /deleted my help files/ and made it unable for me to change the paragraph or character styles inside a document. [Disclaimer: I've been using only the Windows version of InDesign.]

At my day job [Guardians of Order] we use Quark exclusively on the Mac.

On the PC, I prefer InDesign to Quark. Quark on PC just 'feels' a little wrong; it's very obviously a ported application that wasn't originally designed to work on Windows, while Adobe products typically feel much the same on both platforms. Overall, I think I prefer Mac Quark to Windows InDesign.

If you're proficient in either Quark or InDesign, you should have little trouble  migrating between the two. I found that moving from Word to PageMaker was easier than moving from Word to Quark, but in the long run I would have been better off fighting the steeper learning curve and ignoring PageMaker in favour of Quark completely.

BTW, there are some other threads on this subject - if you want, do a search for 'quark' or any other of the tools mentioned and you should find them easily.

[J. Backman]

If you're willing to spend quite a lot of money, go for Adobe InDesign 2.x -- programs for doing lay-out just don't get any better than that. It also comes in some of the Adobe's design bundles together with the latest Photoshop.

[Clay]

I'm going to second Clinton's recommendation for Page Plus.  I have the free download version, which doesn't have PDF capabilities. The full price version is very low cost though, and I found it delightfully easy to use and it did what I asked of it without a lot of grief.

[Andrew Martin]

The PDF995 program is free from: http://www.pdf995.com/ and allows PDF output from any Windows program that can print to a printer. It has one slight disadvantage, in that it pops up a sponsorship window in your browser when the PDF file is created. The finished PDF file doesn't have any adverts or "watermarks" as far as I can see. John DeHope recommended this on RPG.net and I've been trying it out..

[J B Bell]

If you're a wild-eyed socialist linux freak like me, consider learning LaTeX and using emacs to edit it.  This produces nice-looking output, and you don't have to think too hard about it.  It even handles sidebars out of the box.  Actually, it'll do basically anything out of the box, but the learning curve can be nasty.

But hey, it's free.  And can nearly every math department of nearly every university in North America be wrong?

--JB