Pagemaker 7.0 vs InDesign: Comments? 2

[hohriver]

Well, Adobe is at it again....confusing the issue and never providing germane details at their website.

I was surprised to discover 'Pagemaker 7.0' as a new product listing. Drilling down on the 'features' gives you absolutely nothing to work with; they are, more and more, providing 'reviews' from other firms who have endorsed their software, instead of specific information regarding the particular product. Great marketing, lousy information providing.

So who can tell me about Pagemaker 7.0? Is it really an upgrade to Pagemaker 6.5.whatever, that I currently run? I was under the impression that Adobe was not intending to revise Pagemaker, so am confused to see this version release. And how might it compare to InDesign? Has InDesign overcome the gaping error of being unequipped to provide saddle-stitched print material yet?

Could someone who knows kindly clear up this muddied trail that Adobe is so fond of generating? I would appreciate it.

Frankly, I'm about to give up on Adobe entirely and simply jump over to Quark Xpress and the Mac for my prepress layout and design needs.

But that option is so much more expensive than just acquiring another Adobe product which might do the job.

Who knows about these things?

 

[Guest_imported]

InD and PM are 2 different beasts. InD is a resource monster (I can relate to the above post - P200mmx + 128 mg RAM) and it's sloooow! Handy for laying out good looking docs.
Quark is fast, but really awkward. And expensive. Even at $400 off, it's not cheap.
PM7 is an evolutionary upgrade. Faster than InD (tho it's the slowest starting of all the PM's, the data merge plugin takes a while to load, and the interface has slightly changed. Not radical though. It's in the filters (support for current MS office files), Pdf support and the new 5.0 distiller. For the upgrade price, it's a worthwhile expense.

 

[Guest_imported]

I have worked in PageMaker - Illustrator and Photoshop for many years. Before that I worked on an Amiga and they had a program from SoftLogic called PageStream that blew PageMaker out of the water 10 years ago. I often feel frustrated with PageMakers lack of text control and end up going over and tweaking things with Illustrator. PageStream was fast, graceful and beautifully (intuitively) laid out with more powerful features than PageMaker has even today. I've attempted to learn Quark 2-3 times and given up, thinking I should take a class to learn it. When I heard InDesign was Quark-like I decided not to even look at it. I will probably get PM7 for the upgraded pdf support etc. But, I'd love to see hear someone tell me there is a program with PageMaker's ease and lots more text control.

Mindwalker

 

[artdirectoreric]

You know, I've heard the "text-control" thing before, but I don't really know what that entails. I'm not trying to be provocative - I genuinely want to know. What other text controls exist besides the ones offered in Pagemaker? Besides Type-on-a-Path, that is.