A little background: I’m the co-editor of my school newspaper dealie next year, and we have a lot of money that we can only spend on improving the paper itself, and thus have got a bit of a surplus.
I’m wondering if there are any good programs out there that could aid in formatting something like a school paper and make it look nice and… well… not ugly. Money isn’t really an issue, but the two things I’m looking for are an easy-to-use interface and a good end product.
Any suggestions would be welcome!
It’s been a while since I’ve done anything like this, but Quark Express for the Macintosh was a very good program 10 years ago. I imagine it still would be, but it may have been surpassed. What you’re looking for is “desktop publishing” software. Are you looking for a Mac-based program or a Windows-based one?
-lv
Oh, sorry, I should have specified. I’m on a windows based machine. But even that category could help me do a bit of self-googling.
Since you’re looking for suggestions and not asking a question with a factual answer, I’ll move this to IMHO for you.
DrMatrix - GQ Moderator
Speaker, what are you using now?
I ask because this past year, as News Editor of my school paper, I learned how to operate Pagemaker and Photoshop because of the need for us editors to design our own pages. Pagemaker, as far as I know, is the norm.
That’s really awesome that you have a surplus of money. Thank your deity.
Currently we’re using Microsoft Publisher, and have been suggested to use Pagemaker.
PageMaker is an OK choice, but I’d go with Adobe InDesign. Adobe’s marketing image for PageMaker is “those who publish part-time, but don’t consider themselves publishers or graphic designers”, while InDesign is marketed for “publishing professionals.”
PageMaker started the desktop publishing industry, but it hasn’t really kept up with the latest features. Quark surpassed PageMaker years ago, but InDesign is ahead of Quark now, after only a couple of years. Its typography in particular is just beautiful, and its graphic abilities outshine many illustration programs (actually, they are totally beyond any program that came out in the 20th century, and are only surpassed by the newest graphic apps).
Anyhow, I think you’ll not only get a better-looking paper from a professional application, but you’ll learn a lot more about how real newspapers and magazines are produced. You already know you don’t get that with Microsoft Publisher.
If money is really no object, get Adobe’s Design Collection bundle. It has InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat. You can do a lot of pretty stuff with those.
If I was putting together a newspaper with InDesign, I’d look carefully at InCopy, an editorial system Adobe makes. It’s really for large, complex operations (like a glossy magazine or a daily newspaper), but it could help keep the workflow in control. But that’s probably going overboard for a school paper.
Pagemaker is pretty much the publishing industry standard on Windows and Quark is the Mac-based standard.
Note the golden words: industry standard. In other words, if you learn Pagemaker, you’ll be ahead of anyone who doesn’t know PM and be that much better suited to getting a job (summer internship, or whatever) at a local newspaper, if that’s what your future plans are. 
Something else to think of - are there any plans to take the paper online? If so, you’ll need some web page creation tools. Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver seem to be the top two picks. My preference is to Dreamweaver as it produces very clean HTML code. FrontPage dumps in a ton of stuff that only Microsoft really understands.
I haven’t explored this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Dreamweaver can suck in Pagemaker files (either directly or with a third-party converter) and create web pages. Alternately, Pagemaker might know how to make its own HTML files.
Hmmm… InDesign? Guess it’s been a while since I’ve tried to do any “serious” desktop publishing. Color me “out of date” :smack:
I designed the paper my senior year of highschool (designed about half the senior issue by myself, in fact). We used PageMaker on Windows machines. I now attend Indiana University and design for the Indiana Daily Student, one of the top college newspapers in the country. We use QuarkExpress on Macs. I’ve never used InDesign, but I’ve heard the IU’s journalism department (but not the newspaper) is changing over to that next year. So it appears that all three are adequate.
My advice would be to download free trial versions and use them each for an extended period of time (say, a week or two), and see which you like better.
Also, you could check into journalism workshops at a nearby college to spend some of that money. I went to one at Ball State University the summer before my senior year, and it was pretty helpful.
Our school paper used PageMaker and Template on Macs. It looked as professional as any.
I am another former editor-in-chief of a high school newspaper; the Saratoga Falcon, which incidentally won a silver (not gold :() crown from Columbia University this past year. We have been using Pagemaker on Mac G4’s, and they seem to work out well if one has the right templates (setting styles and tabs is a pain).
However, this past fall, I and other journalism students from Saratoga went to the NSPA journalism convention in Dallas. There, I got the sense from the seminars I attended that Pagemaker was still the norm for most of the top high school publications. However, there was a strong strong emphasis that people should start shifting to InDesign, as that has capabilties and safeguards that Pagemaker does not. I myself know a ton about Pagemaker and zero about InDesign, though my feeling is that InDesign is much more advanced, but with more rewards. At the convention I went to, it seems that if one can switch to InDesign, that would be the best way to go.
My program is currently using PageMaker, but when it comes time to buy new software, I’ll be looking at Quark, which I know the city paper uses.
Y’all are making this former managing editor feel old. We used Aldus PageMaker 4.0, on pre-G3 Macs.
As far as repurposing your paper for the web, all publishing products these days have the ability to export in HTML. However, the code they create is often really ugly, by the standards of any hand-coder or real HTML application. But it works, and that’s what’s most important. You’ll still want an HTML app to fine-tune things.
I second the idea of downloading the demos and trying them out. I’m pretty sure all three (Quark, PageMaker, and InDesign) have them available. These things are pretty complex, so you won’t get too much of a handle on them within the demo period, but you should start to get a feel for them.
You may also want to look into the scripting systems. I find scripts to be indispensible, though I know some people don’t use them at all. I can script PageMaker like crazy, but I’m just starting to learn InDesign scripting. It seems a little more difficult, but much more versatile. Don’t know anything about Quark scripting, though.
My high school newspaper uses Quark on Mac G3s. It looks terrible, although this is more a fault of the authors than the program. I used Quark as the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine, and with that experience, I wholeheartedly recommend Adobe InDesign. Whenever I did “layout R&D” (playing with experimental layouts), I used InDesign and had a much better experience with it than with Quark. During the production of the magazine, Quark’s buggy code reared its head many times - disappearing pages, randomly inserted blank pages, layout options mysteriously grayed out - and it was not fun.
I’d say go with InDesign, but I don’t have any experience with PageMaker.
Which version of Quark are you using? As a newspaper worker for the past 15 years, we’ve been pretty happy with Quark 4.2 for our daily. (Of course, we’ve been with it since version 1.0 on Mac Plus machines. Currently we run Wintel boxes, but only because the small newspaper chain to which we belong insists.) Quark 5.0 is out , and if you buy it now, the company promises a free upgrade to 6.0, now in development.
4.2 runs fine on our 95 and 98 machines, but gives us tremendous problems with XP. The newer versions promise to be XP-friendly, and also OS X native on the Mac side. We’re dragging our feet because we’ll have to upgrade something like 25 machines simultaneously, which is a chunk of change when the business climate is soft.
Have heard some good things about In-design, but have not seen it in action yet. Hate to abandon the huge Quark base we have now.
Of course, there is no comparison to Photoshop. Adobe clearly nailed that one. Have used it every day for years, and am always discovering new capacities and clever tricks for this amazing program. Just wish they’d bought Quark instead of Pagemaker.
My highschool paper used PageMaker. The magazine I’m now interning at uses Quark Express.
Macs are out of the question, so unless Quark comes for Windows (98, in this case), I guess it’s between InDesign and Pagemaker. The 200 (more like 300 in CND) dollar difference might be the deciding factor.