Book Design Software

[Martin Miller]

What software do you use for book layout and design? I suppose one could use Word or WordPerfect, but there probably are more specific solutions out there. Thoughts or experience?

[Ralph Barker]

Many magazines use Quark. I'm not sure if book publishers do as well. Once one has mastered style sheets in Quark, and have received the official black robe and wand, it should be sufficiently robust for books, too.

[QT Luong]

My understanding is Quark has somehow been displaced by Adobe Indesign recently. Of course, people with many years of training on Quark may stick with it, but many new users and reviewers seem to prefer Indesign. Besides, it's fairly well integrated with PS, and can be had at a reasonnable price with the Creative Suite update from PS.

[Joe Lipka]

Adobe InDesign and Adobe Acrobat are what I use to create my online portfolios. I know that those are also some of the programs used to produce LensWork magazine.

You can use others, but these two are thought of as the "industry standard." for putting books and magazines together.

[David Karp]

I have heard that InDesign is taking over. Is PageMaker still around? I know for a while they were selling it at much reduced prices from its heyday as a consumer dtp program.

I have it and have used it to make brochures and small catalog type documents. It is really easy to use, especially if you are old enough to understand the pasteup board metaphor.

You could also try to use (gag) MS Publisher. It is just not that good compared to other dtp programs I have seen and used (Quark, early InDesign, PageMaker, PagePlus).

[Frank Petronio]

Adobe InDesign first, Quark second

[Joseph O'Neil]

I have heard that InDesign is taking over. Is PageMaker still around? I know for a while they were selling it at much reduced prices from its heyday as a consumer dtp program. .

-snip-

I still use Pagemaker myself (been using it since Win 3.1 days ), but yes, it seems "InDesign" is the "in thing". I really hate it when some young kid laughs at you for still using Pagemaker. Or you get told "oh, we cannot import PageMaker files properly into our Quark/InDesign."

I was fed up once upon hearing this too many times and asked the dumb kid if I could figure how in the days of Dos I could figure out how to import MS Word documents into WordPerfect, why couldn't he import PageMaker into In Design.

He didn't understand what "DOS" was. *sigh*

Anyhow, PageMaker is less expensive than InDesign, and great for books & brochures - anything in hard copy, printed matter. InDesign is more of a comprehensive package that looks more like a blending of various programs - kinda like merging Coreldrw, photoshop (to a degree) and Pagemaker all in one. Pagemaker handles graphics just fine, and I think it is easier to use once you get onto it. Depends on what you need. InDesing is probally better for web sites as well as printed matter if you are doing both.

There used to be an add-on for PageMaker called "PageMill" that would allow you to make web pages, but I think the new InDesign, from what i have seen of it, incorporates that stuff altogether, and since web publishing seems to be taking over from printed matter publishing, that's the popularity of InDesign.

But you are right about price, PakeMaker Ver 7 is about half the price of InDesign, and does not come bundled together with PageMill and Photoshop LE, version 6.5 used to.

joe

[paulr]

Quark has been the standard for years and years, but my first choice for a book would absolutely be indesign. I'm less comfortable with it, since I have less experience. But it offers typographic control that goes way beyond what Quark can do. If you're going to have any passages of text, there's just no comparison. Indesign sets flowing type more nicely than any other software.

There are other advantages (and some disadvantages) but the type features are the big deal for me.

Pagemaker really can't be considered a professional level publishing tool anymore.

[Daniel Geiger]

I used Quark 3 and 4, but am now on InDesign CS1/2. The main issue for me is price. Quark does not have an educational pricing, but Adobe suite does offer it ($800 vs 200, or so). I think the automatic text flow with Quark was better than the manual linking that is required for every textbox in InDesign. The anchor function in InDesign CS2 is very nice, so you can add text, and the graphics flow with it.

I would think that InDesign will work better with other Adobe files. In the past, for instance, you could not place layered PS files in Quark (now you can), and things like paths can relatively easily be converted to bezier lines etc.

I've done books (i.e, multidocument collection of files with continuous page numbering, indexing etc.) in both programs, and they work quite similarly. Indexing used to be a b&^%# in Quark 4, but that has apparently improved. I just got into indexing in InDesign, and it works quite nicely and is much more straight forward.

InDesign categorically separates text-styles from paragraph styles, so you can not associate a default text-style with a paragraph style as in Quark.

I think the biggest problem is switching from Quark to InDesign, because some of the language/terms is just a tad different, but sufficiently different that you can not find it in the help menus. That should not be a problem if you start in just one program. I STRONGLY recommend that you read the manual, and possibly one of the third party books. Quark/InDesign are quite different from putting a picture into a Word document, or doing webpages.

I hope you have a really big monitor or two decent sized ones. There are even more palettes than in PS. I use the apple 30 inch LCD and that works fine for page spreads. I may still want to get a second monitor just for the palettes.

[Michael Graves]

My computer books are all laid out in Quark, but my fiction has all been done in Adobe InDesign. But as Daniel put it so succinctly; if you're just getting started, pick one, learn it and stick with it if you're doing your own layout. Chances are extremely good that when push comes to shove, should you find a publisher, the best you can hope for in that respect is to have "creative input". Which generally means you get to whine about the cover and they ignore you.