Easy (and cheaper) alternative to Quark Express for beginners?

Hi, agm. There used to be a number of low-priced page-layout applications, years ago. Then MS began pretending Word could do real page layout work, fooled a lot of beginners into thinking they were doing high-quality layouts with it, and killed off the entry-level page layout software market. There is no longer an inexpensive way into the field; if you want to learn the professional way to do page layout work, you use one of the professional applications, which have come down to Quark and InDesign. A professional-level European program, RagTime, isn't a serious competitor in the USA, but it's been around for a long time, so someone must be using it. It has a special education price of $125 for eligible buyers. I haven't seen a copy of it in more than ten years, and it's been through multiple versions and, I think, several owners since then, so whatever it looked like in 1995 probably wouldn't have much relevance now.

You could look for an old copy of Pagemaker, which was once the industry standard and is simple enough for a beginner to learn on. But it doesn't run natively in OS X, and doesn't run very reliably in Classic mode.

Or you could try Pages, Apple's combination word processor/page layout app. I know very little about it. It won't prepare you to graduate to Quark or InDesign, I'm sure, but depending on what you really want to do, it may suffice for your purposes.

Quark was the leader (maybe still is a bit), but Adobe's InDesign has come on very strong. My main client switched to InDesign last year and has been very happy.

That said, there really aren't any cheap page layout programs. There also aren't many to choose from. It's essentially Quark or InDesign. Pagemaker is also owned by Adobe, but that was discontinued at least a year ago. I think you can still find copies around, but there's no sense throwing money at a dead end product. Other than that, there's Apple's own Pages (part of the iWork package). Being a fairly new product, it lacks quite a bit compared to Quark or InDesign. I imagine documents produced from it get scowling looks from professional print shops. They don't like having to deal with non standard documents. And unless it was added to version 2, Pages also doesn't support CMYK.

Edit: Yeah, yeah. That too! What eww said. Don't even consider for a second trying to use Word as a page layout program. It's as good at that as it is for building web pages. In other words, it stinks. Press and prepress shops will hate you forever if you send them a Word document as your brochure layout. They will happily take it though after informing you that they'll have to rebuild the entire project for you in Quark or InDesign. At your cost, of course.

Edit number two: Found two other lesser know page layout apps. Create, which runs $149. And Swift Publisher for $35. But again, you'd be using programs that press shops would be unlikely to accept. If nothing else though, Swift Publisher is cheap enough that you could at least get used to how a page layout app works before investing in the much more expensive Quark or InDesign.

Almost forgot. You can also download a trial version of Adobe's InDesign and Quark Xpress. You can use InDesign's trial software completely, including saving files for 30 days. I think Quark runs for 30 days, also.

Hi, Gordon. I wasn't aware of Scribus, and hastened to download it (and GhostScript) myself. I didn't have any problem getting it to open, but despite carefully following the instructions on the Scribus site about where to put GhostScript, Scribus informed me that GhostScript couldn't be used because it was missing. Restarting didn't help.

Then I noticed that a Scribus window can't be moved: it's fixed in the upper left corner of one's display. Nor do Preference changes — even changes in the format of an active document — take effect in Scribus until after the application has been Quit and relaunched.

But the real problems began when I quit — or tried to. Scribus just won't quit: I select the Quit command, it informs me that it has quit unexpectedly, it puts up a spinning beachball, and it sits there smiling dumbly at me, minute after minute. The only way out of it is a Force Quit, and that's simply unacceptable. So my conclusion is that while open-source, professional-grade DTP software is a wonderful idea and Scribus may have a future, it isn't ready for showtime yet.

Nor is it going to be an easy app for a novice to learn, because it's loaded with features and functions, and its documentation is written for Unix geeks, not for Mac users or DTP learners. Nor is it likely to be embraced by press shops and service bureaus, because a) they aren't going to want to spend big money training their people in yet another DTP application in addition to Quark and InDesign (especially if they have to develop the treaining programs themselves from scratch), and b) they need someone on the other end of a phone line who is responsible for answering any burning questions they need resolved, in real time. Scribus will never offer that.

So I advise you to forget Scribus, or at least set it aside until it's been improved considerably, and keep looking.

Saw this on versiontracker.com:

http://www.belightsoft.com/products/swiftpublisher/overview.php

Don't know if that will work for you or not.

Already mentioned and linked to in my post above.

Sorry, missed that.