Your opinion please: Best text/graphics layout app?

O

OrganLeroy

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I need a great Mac application for layout of text and graphics/photos. Freehand used to be my favorite for this, but I haven't used it for some time. Is it still the one? MS Word for Mac is ridiculously limited in this area.

Great flexibility and pro-level handling of text and graphics are a must, as well as the ability to export files in .pdf.

Thanks!
 
Illustrator if you're used to Freehand and single page stuff. If it's multipage then you'll probably need InDesign as well. If you're not doing a lot of orginal artwork you may be able to get by with only InDesign.
 
>If it's multipage...

Ah yes, thanks for pointing that out. Multipage ability is important.

Is Illustrator superior to Freehand? Or has Illustrator replaced Freehand?
 
Freehand, previously made by Macromedia, has been purchased by Adobe (as well as the rest of Macromedia). Nobody knows what Adobe will do, seeing as how they own two vector illustration applications now (Illustrator, Freehand), but for all intents and purposes, Illustrator is the de-facto standard for vector illustrations now.

For multi-page capabilities, I can second the recommendation for InDesign.
 
If you look at the pricing, however, I'd suggest getting some sort of Creative Suite by Adobe. Standard version gets you Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. Great package. If you really want to get into this, you'll use Illustrator for drawing illustrations (vector art like you did with FreeHand), Photoshop for bitmap graphics like photographs and put them together with text in InDesign. Each application really shines in its area. You won't really wanna do all your illustrations in InDesign directly.
 
I second fryke on getting CS/CS2. Illustrator certainly the best for the graphics, but you don't want to have to do more than minimal text editing/management in it, its performance here is far from pro level. Having just used InDesign solidly for a week I was reminded what great software it is, i smiled when i booted it up in the morning, and that was even the PC version!

Others will push Quark (hi cap'n!) which certainly has its fans, but personally I prefer InDesign by some distance. I really like the integration between InDesign and Illustrator for graphics/Photoshop for images, really makes life easy.
 
ora said:
Others will push Quark (hi cap'n!) which certainly has its fans, but personally I prefer InDesign by some distance. I really like the integration between InDesign and Illustrator for graphics/Photoshop for images, really makes life easy.
Click to expand...

Exactly. I would second the CS/CS2 package just because it's so seamless when you use Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator together. Like Fryke said, they're each great in their own regards and get the job done. Picking just Illustrator or just InDesign would not give you the flexibility that the package would.

As for Quark, it still has it's followers, but I'm still wondering why. :p
 
CS Suite/InDesign gets my vote too. Quark pdf export is BLOATED and after switching 3 years ago I'll never go back to it. Once you learn an Adobe app the tools and processes are nearly the same.

Don't use Illustrator as a page layout tool, but mainly for vector graphics. The main reason being that you get no multi-pages in Illus.

Freehand -- A Macromedia product now owned by Adobe: http://www.adobe.com/products/freehand/
 
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