Ivan, I dumped Quark a couple of years ago. But its because all of my applications are Adobe and they work well together. Quark is more expensive, InDesign handles type better. As for service bureaus, Adobe is very active in teaching service bureaus how to handle InDesign documents. Having said that I'm from New York City and Adobe might not be as active in your area. Just some thoughts

Thank You Daniel. Your input has help me make my decision. I will go with InDesign! I'm from Brooklyn, NY so I think I'll have no problem. Are you freelance or do you work for a firm.

IM

InDesign. Quark is awful.

Good move, Ivan. I used Quark for many years

But Tiffany is right, long documents with many images make the scrolling terribly slow, even in lo-res visualization.

Haven't been able to solve it yet either.

Actually, I would switch back to a world of pain just for a license of Amplitude. ;)

Thanks everybody! By the way Tiffany do you have an online portfolio I can look at. The advice you give in the forum is great and I'm certain this quality is reflected in your designs.

IM

I don't know what I would do for the entire fontbureau collection.

IM

Ivan - Quark is great. I don't know with whom you are going to work - but publishers that I know, - working with Quark; Advertising & Design Firms - the same. However, I'm not saying that InDesign isn't a great tool. If you want to be A Pro - buy both of them (buy one now; make money....)


LOTR

Tiffany, I noticed a *huge* improvement in InDesign's speed and responsiveness when I increased my RAM from 512 MB to 1GB.

(I'm running OS X on dual 800mhz processor G4.)

oops sorry. BTW how do I stop the unsolicited e-mail I get from this site. It's an obscene amount.
IM

Tiffany, although a faster processor + more RAM will help in general, Indy still runs slower than Quark. I'm on a dual 1GHz G4 with 1.5GB RAM and still not happy

left hand of what page IM

I use InDesign 1.5 on 9.2.2, G3, 266 MHz, 96 Mb Ram,
I designed five books so far and they are good.
I used couple of times Quark but it looks like a cracker,
InDesign is more focaccia.

Adobe InDesign vs. QuarkXPress [May, 2004]
http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/30/35065.html

QuarkXPress vs. Adobe Indesign [June, 2003]
http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/30/12197.html

AS

Ivan - work with what you have! Work with what you can afford now! Don't try to WAIT for the LATEST technology. SINCE you'll never catch up!!! Softwares only go SO SO SO far. They don't make good design, designers do!!!


LOTR

don't see it. nothing that says edit preferences in the forum

Ivan, I freelance. I suggest you attend the next meeting of InDesign users group. Go to (registration@InDesignUserGroup.com) The next meeting is September 23rd at The Pratt Institute Manhattan. Agenda "InDesign 101" with Scott Citron and "Interactive InDesign" with Sandee Cohen

I'm using InDesign on a new project after many years with Quark. I like it but is there some trick to reducing the clutter of all the palettes?

Tom also to save real estate change the tool pallet from two columns to one. Thats done in preferences.

Steve Indy stold the nested pallets idea from GoLive, the difference being GoLive lets you store the pallets at the bottom of the screen too!

I have InDesign installed but continue to use PageMaker 6.5 because I'm more comfortable with it. However, I thought PageMaker 5 to be the best of all. Robin Williams published a wonderful guide to it. After 10 years of both platforms I gave up on PCs and use only a Mac and about 10 per cent of the program.

- PageMaker (being replaced by InDesign, useful for database
publishing)
- InDesign (new kid on the block, nice for design-intensive stuff,
lacking in long-document features)
- FrameMaker (on life support, development moved to India,
discontinuation of Mac version may be death knell, limited
typographically --- ask me if you want to see my rant on its
limitations)
- Corel Ventura (nifty program, Windows only, Corel support often
haphazard)
- Quark XPress (development moved to India --- questions about font
support have been made to the OpenType list by at least one person with
a quark.in e-mail address)
- RagTime (versatile program, freely available for non-commercial use)
- Calamus (still hanging on)
- SoftMagic's Project M (nifty program for magazines / newspapers with
an emphasis on workflow and XML)
- Ready-Set-Go (this has been taken over by the foreign distributor
Diwan International --- still pretty cool, and with excellent Arabic
support, and the best guide / grid system for a graphical program)
- Creator (mostly shifted over towards advertising layout)
- Serif PagePlus (competing for the low-end against Microsoft
Publisher)
- Scribus (new, opensource program, looks promising)
- Impress (page layout using TCL - interesting, but sparse
feature-wise)
- PageStream (mostly found on the Amiga)
- VivaPress (interesting --- just came across this, they promise to
pay for imaging errors and are aggressively marketing a competitive
upgrade)
- Typographicus (German program, being marketed as shareware)

Drawing programs usable for page layout

- Macromedia FreeHand / Altsys Virtuoso (works quite well ;)
- Adobe Illustrator (wants a multi-page plug-in)
- Stone Design's Create (interesting 'cause it'll also do a web
page/site)
- Canvas (will also do web publishing)

all of which are still available. Things vanished forever include:

- PasteUp.app
- Uniqorn (or whatever the QuickDraw/GX program was called)
- Pages by Pages (nifty NeXTstep app which never got the visual
template design tool it needed)

Long document batch composition systems:

- Interleaf (now pitched to library services)
- Miles 33 (moving towards SGML publishing)
- Penta (esp. good for math)
- 3B2 (essentially a TeX implementation oriented towards SGML
publishing in an interactive fashion)
- XyVision (esp. notable for the related XyWrite word processor / text
editor --- the latter was used by Robert Bringhurst to make the nifty
``letterfall'' frontispiece in the first edition of _Elements of
Typographical Style_)

Weird things sort of related:

- Cerilica's Truism (mostly pre-press oriented)
- Enfocus Tailor (graphical, interactive editing of PostScript files -
they now do PitStop)

Other things which people use which I'd rather not think about:

- Microsoft Word
- Microsoft Publisher


Courtesy of William F. Adams,
publishing specialist, www.atlis.com

My only complaint is that Indy is slower. If someone could point me towards different things that I can do to improve the performance, well this would make me very happy. (sorry ... thought someone needed to post about this too.)

Jes

It is true that I have certain clients who still use Quark themselves and so I also use Quark. But, when my clients ask me which they should use I tell them InDesign in spite of what I see as a major draw back (speed).

The reason I use Indy when I can is that I find it to be more intuitive as a over all tool. And although I do not do any localization or alternate language work I do use Opentype when I can as I've found recently that most of the type I'm licensing is OpenType.

Marc do you think faster RAM would help? I have an old 400mhz machine with 1.5GB of ram. I'm wondering if I should upgrade my video card and getter newer/faster ram.

Ivan ... are you joking around? When you registered as a typophile user you set your own email notification preferences. Check out the top right hand side of the page, click "edit preferences" and deselect all of the email notification choices.

I meant "left-hand" ... ack!

Really? Crazy!

What about disabling plug-ins? Has anyone had experience with this? I've heard from several forums that disabling the navigator plug-in can speed things up.

IM -- you have to be in the forums ... the link appears on the top of all pages in the forums.

Ivan -- Sorry, it actually says "edit profile". Scroll to the top of this page. Look to the left.

InDesign CS, Tom? You can drag any palette to the side of the
screen and all but the title bar will slide out of view, acting as a
sort of pop-up palette. I love this. I wish Illie and PS had this.

Also, you needn't have any palettes open at all. Just open them
when you need them. Remember Quark? It only gave you the
option of a Color, Layout, Style, and Measurements palette. The
rest of the commands are only accessible via dialog boxes. Boo!
I'd rather have the option of keeping on my screen those
commands I use most.