Our company has been using Adobe PageMaker for its marketing flyers and other advertising materials. Unfortunately, PageMaker is no longer supported by Adobe and IME, it does not work under Windows Vista.
Can anyone recommend a suitable replacement program? Some would suggest Adobe InDesign, but that’s more of a high-end program and it’s outrageously expensive. FrameMaker is more suitable for manuals and other technical documentation. We could use something that’s affordable yet well-suited for simple advertising flyers and brochures.
Quark isn’t an option? I have to use InDesign at my job, but I agree with the expense problem. Personally, I prefer to just put things together in Illustrator.
QuarkXPress might be an option. I’ll have to do some further research, first. (Oh, and to be perfectly honest, I thought it was exclusively a Mac application. Guess I was wrong.)
For single page docs, you could try Illustrator. If you do more than one page it’ll have to be a separate file, though, which is a pain if you’re dealing with flowing text. There’s MS Publisher, but that’s not really for professionals. Quark is more expensive than InDesign and not as good. Really, there’s no replacement for InDesign (and it can open your old pagemaker docs, if that’s an issue). You can get an upgrade price for Indesign CS3 for just $199 if you already have pagemaker: https://store1.adobe.com/cfusion/store/index.cfm?store=OLS-US&view=ols_prod&category=/Applications/InDesign&distributionMethod=UPGRADE&nr=0
Upgrades are available? My previous research didn’t reveal that. Thanks!
I might want to use MS Publisher, as I suspect that it’d be adequate for our purposes (and you certainly can’t beat the price). I haven’t used it often enough to know for sure, though. Also, we only have one PageMaker license right now, which means that we can only use one InDesign upgrade version.
You mentioned that Illustrator is suitable for single-page documents. Unfortunately, I think we’ll be producing more and more two-page flyers. That was my idea, so it’s ultimately my fault. Sigh.
There’s a freeware open-source product called Scribus that claims to do (most of) what InDesign/Pagemaker/Quark will do. I can’t vouch for it though, as I haven’t used it. Maybe you could download it and play around and see if it might meet your needs.
Actually, I’m looking into that right now. My main concern is whether it’ll work under Vista. Some documentation states that it does, but this isn’t stated consistently.
I would have to agree that you would need to use InDesign. Actually you would be better off with the whole new CS3 Suite at this point.
This would allow you to use something that would be the industy standard and has the ability to service you just as long as your PageMaker program has. Also, it will have the flexability to be useful in projects you haven’t even though of yet. There’s a huge number of users with vast amounts of experience who possess a knowledge base that can help you in just about any jam unlike the other programs.
I’d agree with that. My company is going to have to upgrade to CS3 soon because we’re starting to receive files that I can’t open with CS2. The software is great, if expensive, and Adobe seems to be making things work together more smoothly than they used to.
If you’re just doing the occasional simple one- or two-page pieces, Publisher should do fine.
I’ve been laying out a business newsletter with MS Publisher for ten years. Sometime after I started, I bought PageMaker, but it was much more complicated, and I was able to do everything I needed with Publisher. Now, it has its little quirks, and I’m not doing Wired-level high-end design, but it works great for me, and as you said, the price was right!
My main concern is whether it’ll work under Vista. Some documentation states that it does, but this isn’t stated consistently.