Who really knows...? Please help!

eric halfabee

eric halfabee

You talking to me!
Hi

I work in the publishing industry and we have just switched over to OS X, although I have been trialing it for the last year since its official release.

This post is to ask if anyone has the lowdown on Pagemaker coming out for X (either fully X or carbonised).

I would like to now as we will either: have to keep using PM in classic, switch over to InDesign, which would be good but a big task as we have nearly 100 titles (most over 300 pages) that would need converting over (we publish educational text books that get revised when the curriculum changes etc, which is quite often), or wait for a carbon version of PM if it is to come out – Adobe said that it was going to do all its major titles, if you can class PM as one of Adobe's major apps now.

Thanx in advance

Eric
 
Deaer Eric,

Stay with PageMarker at present and do not go over to Indesign 2 for MacOS X. I bought it for and it was a big mistake. Not impressed at all with the product. Stability is like a house of cards. If you don't believe me, check out the Adobe Forum for Indesign and you will see the pissed off people such as myself.

Advice. Stay with PageMaker in Classic and wait for the Carbonised version. Wait for a demo and try it out on X to see if the application is any good. Don't get me wrong, not every Adobe product is bad. PhotoShop 7 for MacOS 7 is excellent, has crashed once yet and Illustrator, althou slow is OK.

Stay clear of Indesign 2 for MacOS X. Indesign 2 for MacOS 9 is OK, but I didn't play around with it long enough.

Hope it helps
 
PageMaker's future is very unclear. InDesign 2 has proven very stable in our production environment, but we don't use it for 300+ pages documents. We do brochures and the like, although I've personally produced a book with InDesign 1.5.

Adobe's official statement was that the next full upgrades of their major apps would be Mac OS X native, and they meant Carbon by that. But PageMaker hasn't *really* been updated since 6.5, which is quite a few years now. My tip: Try InDesign. The trial version is good enough for getting a feel for the application, but you'd also have to have in mind that it's clearly targetted at a different audience.

My real tip: Get on the phone with Adobe. Try to reach a product manager. Look for their e-Mail address or something. Ask direct and short questions about what they think you should do. Of course you'll only get the 'Adobe' side of the story, but that seems to be your actual problem right now: The uncertainty of PageMaker's future and whether InDesign will do the trick for you.

There's also a mailing list of interest: http://www.blueworld.com/blueworld/lists/indesign.html ... Some Adobe people are on the list. They do a good job of helping users out there.
 
I can't speak for long document publishing, but for single page and annual reports and such, ID2 is the bomb. I've been a fan since 1.0 after using Quark for years, so I know what I'm talking about, or at least have perspective.

Depending on what you're doing, ID2 can run circles around anything out there. No other app can do the following anywhere near as well, if at all:

1. automated typography based on the paragraph as a whole
2. Typography based on visual data (hanging indents)
3. Opentype font support (Opentype is the future, get with it)
4. built-in transperency for any object, vector or otherwise including tables (this is huge, super huge, major time saver)
5. native support for Photoshop layered files and AI files

Those 5 things alone, for me, crush Quark like a grape. I could see , howver, for long document educational publishing, those things wouldn't be all that big a deal and ID2's sluggishness in X would make it too unresponsive for long docs. I still find ID2 in X unacceptably sluggish compared to Quark, but the other features make it worth it. Also, I mostly do single page ads and such, so it's not that painful.

As for ID2 in OS X, it is rock solid in my experience. Also, Suitcase 10 works well with it, though fonts can't be auto-ativated :( (yet).

I would recommend that anyone considering ID2 simply DL the demo and play hard with it for a few weeks. You will become a convert like me, but only if you take time to learn it reasonably, not just toy around for an hour.
 
Go get a copy if InDesign. The program runs circles around Quark and PageMaker. As far as problems, I've had non. And that's running OSX w/InDesign 2 on a Beige 300 G3 desktop.

I believe they said PageMaker is slated for the history books anyways, with no future planned upgrades.

Good Luck
 
InDesign 2 has been super stable in our environment! (plus the fact that if it does crash, it'll recover the work from where the crash occurred!... but hasn't crashed yet.)

But, as CockneyGeezer informs you, not everyone has had it good. So, best to do a test run or something, since you're data and time is obviously of a critical nature.
 
I have used Pagemaker in the past in classic, and it worked like a charm. I haven't *worked* with InDesign 2.0 yet but have played around with it in the pre-press section of the print company I work for, and I was impressed. They say it's damn stable...
 
Just spent an enjoyable morning with Russell Brown showing his talent as a demonstrator / photoshop guru dude type person doing a fine job of marketing PS 7.

Anyway there was this Adobe Australia guy (I'm in New Zealand BTW) who was about to do the next demo/show and I asked him and he said definately not, no, nay, never, no more to Pagemaker coming to and OS X near you. So we have to stick with PM in classic – and it works fine, or we can make the switch to InDesign ASAP as we will more than likely do anyway.

FYI I think InDesign rocks, just did one chapter of a 26 chapter book in it and it wasn't too difficult (the book spretty simple though). It just needs a little more speed which I gather is also a OS X thing.

Thanks for your replies.

eric
 
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