PageMaker vs. QuarkXpress - Aldus Corp.'s PageMaker for Windows 5.0 and Quark Inc.'s QuarkXPress desktop publishing software packages - includes related articles describing the characteristics of high-end desktop publishing software, lower-priced alternatives, and Corel Corp.'s Corel Ventura version 4.2 - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Jan, 1994 by Steve Morgenstern

DOZENS OF DESKTOP PUBLISHING PROGRAMS CROWD the market, but at the top of the page-layout chain you'll find only two: Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress. Ventura Publisher (recently acquired by Corel Systems and renamed Corel Ventura) and Frame Technology's FrameMaker are powerful, but Ventura is long overdue for an update and FrameMaker targets professionals who create highly structured documents in a networked environment. Scrappy midrange packages like Microsoft Publisher and Manhattan Graphics's Ready,Set,Go! nip at the heels of PageMaker and XPress, but they aren't designed to deliver the precise control and flexibility demanded by desktop publishing professionals.

It's tough for any DTP software developer to challenge the dominance of these two market leaders. PageMaker has sold astronomically well for years, creating an enormous community of desktop publishers who feel comfortable with the product. And although the number of copies of XPress shipped pales in comparison, it has been adopted by the influential professional design community--XPress is the art directors' and graphics professionals' darling (including HOME OFFICE COMPUTING'S dauntless page-layout pros). Both products are well supported by outside sources: books and magazine articles, utility software, instructional tapes and seminars, and DTP service bureaus that know how to turn output from either program into press-ready pages.

But there's more to the ranking of these two programs than a simple sales snowball effect. They are both extraordinarily powerful, well-designed products. And with the latest releases of PageMaker and XPress, both continue long-standing traditions of worthwhile innovation and unflagging competition.

Similar Features in Abundance So how do you choose between the Mercedes and the BMW of professional desktop publishing packages? We'll discuss their differences a little later. Let's start by talking similarities.

For this review, we looked at PageMaker 5.0 for Windows and the Mac and XPress 3.2 for the Mac, which were shipping at test time. We also looked at a prerelease copy of XPress 3.2 for Windows. At press time, however, Quark decided against shipping the Windows 3.2 release and instead planned to simultaneously launch QuarkXPress 3.3 for both Windows and the Mac in late 1993. Version 3.3 was expected to differ only in minor ways from 3.2, with new features such as spot color updating; the major enhancement planned for the update was the addition of variable shaped text boxes.

The fundamentals for fast, accurate page layout are extremely well implemented in both platform versions of PageMaker and XPress. For text processing, both provide spell-checkers, comprehensive search and replace capabilities, and fully formatted file import from most major word processing packages. They also include robust style sheets for creating named sets of paragraph specifications.

PageMaker and XPress are nearly omnivorous in their current versions when it comes to digesting graphics in a wide variety of file formats, including newly implemented support for Kodak's PhotoCD format. With this revision, XPress on the Mac nearly comes up to speed with the Mac version of PageMaker by adding the ability to import PC-based graphics formats, such as Windows metafile and BMP files, though it still lacks support for common formats like PCX.

For assembling pages, both programs let you establish column guides as well as add user-defined, onscreen guidelines. They go further by supporting baseline grids that literally make it a snap to align text accurately across multiple columns. And in 5.0, PageMaker gains the ability to open multiple documents at once (long a strength of XPress), so that you can easily move or copy page elements between different publications.

There is much hue and cry about the relative technical merits of the extensive color reproduction system that each package employs, but let us give you the quick HOME OFFICE COMPUTING version. There are two fundamental types of color printing. With spot color, an additional colored ink is applied by a separate printing plate as the paper zooms through the press. If the spot colors you're using have a little white space around them (a headline, for example, or single-color spot illustration), it pays to create separate output pages for each spot color you print. This makes it simple for the printer to produce separate materials for each color. Both programs have always handled that assignment, and it's probably the kind of color task you'll deal with most often. Where spot color gets tricky is when one tint touches another, which requires trapping, choking, and knockouts. These are technically demanding print settings best left to commercial printing professionals.

Sunifar advice holds for four-color process printing, in which dots of four different color inks--cyan, magenta, yellow, and black--are artfully combined to produce full-color graphics reproduction. Since PageMaker and XPress cater to graphics professionals, both include extensive high-end color reproduction capabilities. PageMaker now incorporates process-color separation capabilities that previously required a separate software purchase, whereas XPress improves its color separation strengths by including EFIColor support (for color matching among monitors, scanners, printers, and offset presses) and continuous-tone color separations for additional graphics file formats. For most small-business desktop publishers, high-end color separation work is better left to professionals who can afford the trial and error and training it takes to get it right.