Pagemaker vs Quark question

Factual Questions
1

I’m sorry that this question is only vaguely appropriate for this category, but I need to know if I can be smug about being right!
A certain person at a certain workplace insists that they buy her QuarkXpress, because Pagemaker doesn’t print pictures as well.

What?? Is she just making that up? She did make up other arguments -she needs a Mac because Quark ‘doesn’t run on PCs’.

I know there is some anti-Pagemaker bias at my work (which is not her work), but I understood that’s because it has had film/plate outputting problems.

2

I’m not too sure if there are any differences in picture quality between the two applications. My high school newspaper used Pagemaker (I believe 8.5) back in '97-'98, and my university’s newspaper currently uses Quark… and personally I didn’t see any “innate” difference in picture quality between the two. (Well, differences that weren’t due to poor photography anyway.)

Maybe something has happened in the latest versions of the applications to change this… but I wouldn’t know what.

LilShieste

3

I have used Pagemaker for 13 years and the images are fine. I doubt if much processing, if any, is applied by page layout programs anyway; the image quality is more up to the program that created or edited it. PM does little more than size, crop and rotate.

However, Pagemaker is obsolete, and has been superceded by Adobe’s InDesign. PM will not be upgraded anymore.

So Quark, which is pretty much an industry standard, is probably a good choice to start. Quark DOES run on PCs, and has for years. (Just get the PC version!)

People tend to like what they are used to and criticize the rest.

4

Oh, I know it runs on PCs- it’s on mine! That was just one of the things she said which made me doubt her credibility.

InDesign just isn’t doing that well (around here, at least). No one uses it! I hear it’s great, but I can’t think of anyone that’s bothered to learn it well. We have it at work, but we use Quark 5 for everything the clients haven’t given us.

5

I’ve used both since about 1989, though I confess I haven’t fired up PageMaker for anything for several years (don’t do much in QXP anymore either). While generalizations are always rife with exceptions, for the most part people are or who think like designers tend to prefer the way PM works, while production-oriented types tend to prefer QXP. In PM, you grab some text or an image and plunk it down on the page and move it around until it’s where you want it. In QXP, you create a frame on the page and put the text or the picture into it. There used to be solid reasons for those of us who’d learned the trade setting type on conventional (i.e., non-PostScript, non-desktop) systems to prefer QXP, in that obtaining pinpoint control over letterspacing and kerning, and a few other tasks, were easier, but PM achieved parity with QXP in this regard along about PM 6 or so. There’s very little you can do in one that you can’t do in the other, and there’s no reason whatever for the quality of printed images to vary between them (assuming you’re not doing something dumb like using the rudimentary image manipulation features of either to alter the images, which you can only do with TIFF and one or two other formats anyway). There were also, as has been suggested, greater challenges in getting high-res output done correctly in PM for a while; it was always possible to do high-quality work in either, but at one time it was easier in QXP. For a long time, the mantra was that QXP was for putting ink on paper (i.e., creating materials to be printed via conventional offset printing processes) while PM was for putting toner on paper (i.e., creating documents that would be laser-printed only – newsletters, frequently updated 1 color spec sheets, etc.). Indeed, Adobe ultimately adopted this distinction itself. Contrary to what Musicat said, PM is still around as Adobe’s “business publishing” solution, described on the Adobe site as “the ideal page layout program for business, education, and small- and home-office professionals who want to create high-quality publications such as brochures and newsletters”, while InDesign is aimed squarely at the the professional publishing market where QXP’s hegemony still prevails.

All that being said, switching back and forth is something of a pain, and if you’re accustomed to doing things in QXP, having to do anything elaborate in PM can take forever as you try to remember how to do it – I daresay the same is true the other way round as well. While the woman in question is, as you suspected, full of it, there still might be a case to be made for spending the $800 or so to get her a copy of QXP – she’s likely to be much more productive in an environment she’s familiar with, assuming that there aren’t several other people using PM that she’s expected to work interchangeably with.

6

Adobe added only bugfixes to 6.5 for more than five years. They are now at vs. 7. The word on the street is they want to kill it and move users to InDesign – they are agressively offering upgrades from PM to ID.

PM was originally a product developed and marketed by Aldus. Adobe bought out Aldus, but they probably pay royalties on each copy of PM sold, so there is a natural tendancy to create an inhouse product that doesn’t require outside royalty payments.

This is similar to Microsoft’s buyout of Fox Software. Fox had a killer app that ran rings around Borland’s dBase, but they lacked the marketing muscle. MS bought them out, paid royalties to the original designers, and milked the product as a cash cow for years. But their Access database was developed inhouse, and since every Access copy sold was more profitable than FoxPro, they have dropped all Fox development. You could see that coming.

Sure, MS will still sell you FoxPro, dBase can still be purchased, and Adobe will gladly sell you Pagemaker. But read the handwriting on the wall – it would be unwise to hitch your wagon to a product that is doomed to extinction.

FYI – PM 6.5 offers both frame placement, a la Quark, and the old-style text placement with “window shade” handles. Both work and you can mix them in the same document.

Another FYI – years ago, I gave up trying to supply service bureaus and printers with the pile of files necessary to output a print job created in ANY program. Missing fonts, version incompatabilties, interpretation quirks, etc. reared their ugly heads all too often. Then I began using Acrobat PDF output and have become a rabid fan. I now give printers & service bureaus a single PDF file with instructions that NOTHING is to be altered. The distilled PDF file is compact and outputs to any printer, any imagesetter at the best quality that unit can handle, with no missing fonts. I would never go back.

If you’re wondering about image resolution, I use the highest available during layout. Then I instruct Distiller to resample all images on-the-fly while making the PDF to a resolution appropriate to the printer or imagesetter. This makes a compact file, stripping off the unneccessary stuff but retaining the good stuff.