Desktop Publishing software

Steve Schulze

I'm in the process of laying out a book which will eventually go into print. It's a combination of text pages and image pages with more images interspersed throughout the writing. A lot of finicky layout stuff.

At the moment I'm bouncing between Photoshop and Microsoft word which aren't really up to the job and are slowly driving me insane. If anyone's had experience with this sort of work I'd be interested to know what software they'd suggest working with.

Lamont

I use Adobe InDesign.






For some reason I read "Desktop Phishing Software"..

Nox

InDesign, basically it's industry standard for book/magazine publishing. It's great software.

iadagraca

Doesn't manga studio/clip studio have features like this?

Murren

Definitely InDesign

thomasp

way back in university, we used adobe framemaker for that instead of the likes of indesign (Which at least back then was very early days and not able to handle long documents).
the more technically minded preferred a markup system called latex but i doubt that would appeal to an artist at all. used lots in books but less so for complex layouts from what i've seen.

Lamont

A long time ago Indesign was a joke. It was easier to make a template in Illustrator that was linked to multiple documents and edit my text in Illustrator.

Now you can actually use it in production, it works.

Kwramm

thomasp wrote: »

way back in university, we used adobe framemaker for that instead of the likes of indesign (Which at least back then was very early days and not able to handle long documents).
the more technically minded preferred a markup system called latex but i doubt that would appeal to an artist at all. used lots in books but less so for complex layouts from what i've seen.

LaTeX is great for expressing mathematical formulas, and you can output it into many different formats. It's a bit like HTML, you author it in plain text and many people find it quite nice and distraction free. It's got a pretty big following in academia because of that.
But if you really care about page "design" in the artistic sense, then I don't think it's easy to deal with, as it's not interactive, and its WYSIWIG editors are not comparable with Word or DTP programs.

Equanim

You could sort of do it with Adobe Bridge, but renting InDesign would save you a lot of time and headache.

Muzzoid

Yep I'm also laying out a friends book. Indesign is such a huge time saver. Highly recommended.

Lazerus Reborn

Wasn't the vertex books swapped over to Indesign to keep quality up to standard?

thomasp

what is it like these days with DTP software if - say - you need to swap out a lot of images in your book that have already been embedded in the file? or if your general style for header size, fonts etc changes? do you need to go through it all manually?

that was the biggest drawback of word et al when i was dealing with this stuff (aside from the general unreliability). you had to do it mostly yourself and babysit page wraps where latex would just fetch images from a folder and embed them and you spent most of the time on layout by setting up rules for everything like in a CSS style sheet.

framemaker definitely covered the latter but i think images were still a manual import + placement.

disclaimer - i have not looked at any of this since about the year 2000.

Steve Schulze

Thanks chaps. I have acquired a trial of InDesign and am currently prodding it with a stick.

Muzzoid

Just curious. If you name is Stevem, why was your nickname Jackablade?

Thomas, all those things are handled by indesign. it's why it is good.

Steve Schulze

Hehe. That's an alias that's stuck around since high school. It comes from Thief: The Dark Project. It's extremely rare for it to be used somewhere I'm trying to sign up so I've held onto it for better or worse.