I have a new business opportunity coming my way that involves some desktop publishing from home. Small-scale stuff.
I have some experience with a few programs, but it’s been a couple years. The last I used was InDesign, and as of maybe three years ago it was good and seemed preferred.
Anyone out there up on this stuff feel like giving me the skinny? Is this still the way to go? Is there a new version? Is it PC-compatible?
What other options are out there?
Thanks a bunch.
InDesign has been updated with the CS4 versions of Adobe’s Creative Suite. It’s available for PC and Mac.
I’m a former FrameMaker user, and I did large manuals thick with indexes and tables of content. FrameMaker is definitely overkill for light use. If you’re doing pictorial stuff, like brochures, InDesign might be a better way to go. When I first started using it a few years ago, InDesign was weak on things like indexing and ToCs, but I think it’s improved.
For Mac users, Pages is a good choice for light graphical work. For PC users, Word or the writing components of OpenOffice or CorelOffice might be good. There’s also Microsoft Publisher, but I’ve never used it.
Are you looking towards brochures and the like? I’ve had good results doing brochures with spot colours and line art in Illustrator, but later migrated that content into InDesign CS3, which made managing different print settings for varying content much more convenient when outputting PDFs.
If you’re comfortable with InDesign and can afford it, that’s the way to go IMHO. If you can’t afford it or perhaps it’s overkill for what you’ll be doing, MS Publisher ain’t bad. It’s “DTP for Dummies” in a big way, but does everything I’ve ever needed out of a DTP program – I don’t prep materials for 4-color press or anything. (I used to use/teach PageMaker back in the day, so I know from a real DTP program.) Publisher also has a lot of templates, etc. that you’re not going to get out of InDesign or Quark XPress.
Thanks, I’ll start comparing InDesign new with MS Pub.
Are you going to use this to publish an on-demand book?
If you’re going to be sending files to a commercial printer, ask what they support. Many will not accept Publisher files.
OTOH, almost everyone accepts PDFs, which I assume you can generate from Publisher files. OTOOH, if changes need to be made after you send a PDF to a commercial printer, they can’t make the changes.
That’s where I was going with my question. A friend of mine published an on-demand book using PDF.
I see your points. At the moment I’m just doing flyers and maybe going into pamphlets and such later - I may need additional complexity as I go, but I’m starting as basic as it gets.
For matters of simplicity MS is probably better, but I have experience already with InDesign and it could allow for both more options and greater creative flexibility if its needed down the line, am I correct here?
think of what you’ll actually do with the software. If you’re just inserting pictures with a normal grid work of fonts and text then you can keep it basic.
True, but looking to the future, why not be prepared for better? I can get the program as sort of a gift - I’m not paying for it. I just haven’t had time yet to check out the specific sites to get comparison details on what I can expect from either program.
If you’re sending the publication to a printer, make sure the program supports printers’ colours (CMYK), or at least spot colours.
Regular RGB images get converted to CMYK when printed, and it’s nice to be able to specify that text and line art remain solid black (or another spot colour) instead of being converted to combinations of CMY and K. That way you can have solid smooth text, and it won’t be hard-to-read slivers of four-colour CMYK overprinting.
I’ve seen comics converted this way instead of keeping the black text and line art separate from the coloured fill, and they are much harder to read. I’ve also seen countless ads that were hard to read because the text was four-colour and rough around the edges instead of being printed separately. To be fair, though, that was also the fault of using to coarse a printing screen for the size of the text in question.
A lot of this only applies if you are doing colour. Most of the stuff I did was monochrome, and near the end, I did stuff with spot colours.
Years ago I used Adobe Pagemaker for newsletters, annual reports and other publications. That was an early version back when DTP was just starting out. It was not easy to learn, but once I did, it was an excellent program. I now see Ver 7 is available, but can’t compare it to the other ones posted here. Just a suggestion
I did not know Pagemaker was still available. Adobe certainly de-emphasizes it on their website! The product page says that they have discontinued development of Pagemaker and are pushing people towards InDesign.
Here’s the link: http://www.adobe.com/products/pagemaker/
Edit: the FAQ on that page about switching to InDesign is dated 2005.