Desktop publishing - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Sept, 2000 by Susan Glinert

Six of the latest document tools for everyone from beginners to professionals

Desktop publishing (DTP) has revolutionized the printing industry and changed the way businesses handle printed material. Thanks to the latest DTP software, even the smallest home-based operation can easily produce its own letterhead, brochures, newsletters, or marketing flyers without dealing with commercial printing establishments.

Today's crop of DTP programs ranges from template-based tools to professional applications. To choose a product, you should decide first why you'll need it--small brochures, a few business cards, glossy four-color advertisements, or technical manuals. Then assess your budget and your designer's skill, even if it's your own.

We've sampled six DTP packages in a variety of price and power categories. We tested each on a 450MHz Pentium II desktop with 386MB of RAM, constructing a four-page newsletter and a long, multipage document and printing them to both a Lexmark Optra R+ monochrome laser and Epson Stylus Color 3000 color ink-jet printer. We also tried the Web output of programs that offered it.

The lower-priced programs here--Corel Print Office and Microsoft Publisher -are aimed at novices. They supply templates and clip art, and walk you through the process of adding your text and customizing a publication.

At the other end of the spectrum, heavyweights QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign assume you're a graphics pro seeking do-it-yourself tools to design sophisticated documents and four-color separations. These products also assume you have a library of artwork and typefaces of your own, and thus ship with few extras.

Adobe PageMaker and Corel Ventura Publisher fit somewhere in the middle: They're more complicated than the fill-in-the-blanks programs, but supply templates and ancillary features that soften their somewhat formidable feature sets.

THIS MONTH

FOR PROFESSIONALS

Adobe InDesign 1.5
Rating: 8

QuarkXPress 4.1
Rating: 7

FOR OCCASIONAL PUBLISHERS

Adobe PageMaker
6.5 Plus
Rating: 9

Corel Ventura 8 Publisher
Rating: 8

FOR BEGINNERS

Corel Print Office 2000
Rating: 7

Microsoft Publisher 2000 Deluxe
Rating: 8

RATINGS

HOME OFFICE COMPUTING rates products on a scale of 1 to 10-with few 9's or 10's-based on value, performance, innovation {medals go to rare standouts in these areas}, ease of use, and suitability for home offices. The [up arrow] and [down arrow] symbols indicate pros and cons.

Adobe InDesign 1.5 HOC RATING: 8

The newest kid on the DTP circuit, InDesign 1.5 offers a wide variety of features, complex page assembly, and first-rate drawing tools for experienced publishing gurus.

Unlike its rival QuarkXPress, InDesign is Internet-aware; we readily created documents for the Web in both HTML and PDF (Adobe Acrobat) formats. Not surprisingly, InDesign offers tight integration with Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator. Likewise, its interface follows the Adobe dockable-palette model and permits only modest user configuration.

The absence of any tools for book compilation, Lists, and indices makes InDesign a pain to use for Long documents, though otherwise the program is built for power publishing-layers, drawing tools, complex text wraps, spreads, bleeds, and automatic trapping are all here.

For the finicky studio pro, InDesign1 offers a multiline composer that Looks ahead several Lines to determine the best way to create optically pleasing text. You'll also find optical kerning and margin alignment, making InDesign a standout for text composition.

The professional design crowd--especially users who work with relatively short documents-- Will adore InDesign for its ultradeluxe features and Quark-beating $699 price.

[up arrow] Flexible design features; fair price [down arrow] Few tools for too long documents

QuarkXPress 4.1 HOC RATING: 7

Unquestionably, QuarkXPress 4.1 (commonly known as Quark) is for the Layout specialist. You won't find wizards, configurable palettes, or instant publishing features here, but you will find superb color management and exquisite type control.

Most features in Quark are accessed via floating palettes. Although the interface is streamlined, it Lacks the context-sensitive help and personalization that are standard in other packages. Likewise, Web page designers won't find any HTML publishing features--a serious omission in Light of the competition's attendance to the Internet.

Graphics experts will find much to Love, including the ability to run text around both sides of an object, as welt as convert text to objects and fill them with images. However, there are no Layers as in the Adobe products here.

Although Quark's Long-document tools pale next to those of Ventura Publisher, we were able to compile multichapter books, tables of contents, and indices. Quark also neatly synchronized style sheets across books and automatically updated page numbers in our documents.

For commercial print media, QuarkXPress is a standard. But its $849 price tag makes it a costly, Limited choice. We hope the upcoming 5.0 release addresses some of these issues.