EXCLUSIVES

DESIGN PROGRAM

Words by Bill Troop

Quark deserves top place for the phenomenal innovations in Quark 6.5 and Quark 7, which we have been using in beta for months. Quark 7, with its long public beta, is the most stable yet feature-rich version of Quark we have seen since 4.01. No company has spent more time listening to what users actually want—and then actually implementing it. Though Quark is still the market leader by far, it is feeling the heat from Adobe’s ambitious InDesign. That has spurred Quark to new competitive heights.

Adobe InDesign is not our favorite layout program. We find the interface clunky, and we think the “optical kerning” and “optical alignment” capabilities are cynical features which Adobe knew would cause more harm than good, for reasons we detailed in MacDirectory Summer 2005. That said, InDesign is such a fabulous, industrial strength program that we want to award it too. It is simply too good to ignore. If the only innovation in InDesign you considered was its scriptability, you would still have to conclude it is a stunningly useful program.

Pages, from Apple, is not intended to be a professional page layout application, but rather an idealized combination of word processing and page layout for non-professional users. However, professional designers are beginning to fall in love with this program, and many are using it exclusively. It also has font capabilities no other program has. We’ll be hearing a lot more about Pages in the future.

What can we say about Adobe Illustrator? Since 1989, this has been one of the great Mac design programs. Sure, there are (or were) great things about Freehand (which debuted two years earlier), and there are lovely capabilities in many similar programs. Let us also not forget to mention Lari Software’s innovative LightningDraw GX from 1996, which provided many of the ideas that have since driven Illustrator development. But Illustrator is the program that ties it all together; it is the essential glue which designers work with today. Unquestionably, it deserves an award—even though it only lets you design one page at a time.

Finally, we’d like to mention Adobe’s old Pagemaker 7, which wasn’t even on our list initially. This stalwart old classic of page design is still being used today, although Adobe hasn’t put any development into it for years and you have to use it in Classic mode. For long book projects, Pagemaker is a superb choice which still can’t be beat in key respects by either Quark or InDesign. The Old Lady of page layout is tottering gracefully towards the grave, but hey – doesn’t she deserve one last award? She won’t be able to run on the new MacIntel machines. But she’s helped a lot of us create a lot of very beautiful pages. And she will continue to do so for some time to come.

And the winner is — Quark 7 for its features and sheer usability. But each of these programs is an essential part of the page design picture today and each, honestly, is equally deserving.