Desktop Publishing (DTP) Alternatives to Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress
Graphics studio greetings to all the graphic industry! Here was an interesting Tweet I came across on a Twitter Watch List for InDesign which has an in-depth report with reviews for alternative desktop publishing or DTP applications for a Mac.
It is long, but interesting and starts with:
“You probably recognize this class of software I’m reviewing now as Desktop Publishing (DTP). Page layout tools allow a designer to arrange artwork, photography and type into a meaningful and attractive composition. Usually the features allow a designer to flow text across multiple pages and around artwork, exercise special control over type and other details, and make accurate and easy adjustments to anything in the publication. Better programs offer ways to make templates and master pages that can be used over and over, and for serious professional level work, they support different colour spaces (RGB for screen production and CMYK and spot colours for designing press ready materials).
In my professional life I use InDesign CS4 daily, and really like its features and tools. I have a very high regard for Adobe’s typesetting engine which has automatic optical kerning and a fantastic paragraph composer that sets text with real grace. I will be using this as my professional measure to compare and contrast the contenders in the review.”
Source: http://jonwhipple.com/blog/2009/08/08/laying-it-all-out/
Naturally most of us are not going to throw out our Adobe Creative Suite just yet, but they do cover some interesting layout application alternatives for use on your Macintosh. If you need to just quickly arrange your color graphics for an indesign booklet or a simple poster for print, these may be for you. Here is the overview of the ones they covered:
Create 14
“One low-cost application with all the features of professional page layout, illustration and web-authoring systems and Free Upgrades for Life – find out why people love Create®! Create combines the major features of applications like Illustrator®, InDesign®, Pages®, GoLive®, Canvas®, DreamWeaver®, QuarkXPress®, Streamline® in one easy-to-use, low-cost, completely OS X native application”Create was one of the first graphics applications that was Mac OS X native. Over the years the feature set has been expanded and the offering has a lot of potential.
iCalamus
“iCalamus offers an easy approach to DTP, and an excellent choice for creating simple posters, to complex magazines, scientific works and book publishing. iCalamus is a multi-lingual, frame-oriented desktop publishing solution for Mac OS X.”There’s a lot more here, in nice quirky English translated from German. I had to look up what a Calamus was to get the name of this program (the hollow shaft of a feather, also known as the quill) and it attendant icon. It has some neat features like live masking and frame level blending modes and more. Despite the language triggering a bit of cognitive dissonance, this looks promising.
iStudio Publisher
“Professional design tools needn’t cost you the earth. Built on industry standards, the new iStudio Publisher helps you create everything from simple letters to designing great-looking flyers with the confidence that your final output will be what you see on screen.”Developed by designers, writers and developers dissatisfied with current solutions, this looks like a full featured app and I am looking forward to it. It also uses an original tesxt setting engine, like the Adobe apps, where the others are presumably relying on ATSUI (Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging) so I am curious to see the results.
Swift Publisher
“Swift Publisher – easy page layout on your MacNo doubt that staying in touch with your customers and group members is important for you. With Swift Publisher, publishing attractive and informative documents for business, social and home activities becomes a snap.
Swift Publisher is an excellent Macintosh page layout application for designing and printing colorful flyers, newsletters, brochures, letterheads, booklets, etc. A great selection of templates inspires your creativity and a variety of editing tools lets you quickly apply it.”
A good positioning statement that makes it clear that Swift Publisher is intended for use in focused small business publishing. It offers a tonne of graphic support and an interface that appeals to me.
WorksWell
“Broadly fitting in the categories of Drawing, DTP and Reporting software, WorksWell has features which place it firmly within its own unique niche.WorksWell’s foundation is built on robust drawing tools set in a powerful environment which allows; layering, grouping, undo, 6,400% zoom and truly massive control of attributes. Text support is well integrated with graphic objects, text can be made to fit shapes or take on graphical attributes by using the artistic text tool.
It’s when we go beyond the powerful drawing capabilities of WorksWell that people really start to sit up and take notice. Multiple page support, Charts and PDF markup takes us well into DTP territory; advanced merging facilities takes us beyond. Merging is possible from a number of sources; iTunes and iPhoto may be used as content for documents of your own design opening up unlimited possibilities.”
This sounds good, but I don’t know what merging means in this context, or just what to expect. But…reviews are an adventure and I am always a sucker for unique functionality.”
Then they have the verdict of the best alternative layout application for a Mac here, which I will let you read yourself! I wonder if these alternative apps 2 Adobe Creative Suite for preflighting capabilities are such as FlightCheck can provide?…
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I’m surprised you didn’t mention http://www.scribus.net, professional open-source DTP, I’ve used it quite a bit and it’s got quite a rich feature set. The interface isn’t quite as polished as InDesign, but it’s got some good features that InDesign doesn’t have. Contact me at email at eliot dot com dot au if you’d like a copy of my full report on Scribut and I’ll send it on.