Page Maker?

[eos]

ok, my sister needs something that's like page maker so she can make her asian-american magazine. it costs too much to buy the program so if anyone has any ideas, advice, etc. it will be greatly appreciated.
it has to look nice because it's not your run-of-the-mill bedroom-published zine. she's president of her school's multicultural org. so this can't be done half-assed.

thanks!

[Atealtha]

Get Adobe InDesign. Since it's in a school, see if she can get some educational discount. I bought the entire CS2 suite for $400. InDesign alone costs $200 with this discount, but you might want to consider getting Acrobat Professional also, which is an additional $160. Might as well get the CS2 Suite and get yourself Bridge, Photoshop, and Illustrator on top of everything.

[SunWuKong]

ok, my sister needs something that's like page maker so she can make her asian-american magazine. it costs too much to buy the program so if anyone has any ideas, advice, etc. it will be greatly appreciated.
it has to look nice because it's not your run-of-the-mill bedroom-published zine. she's president of her school's multicultural org. so this can't be done half-assed.

thanks!

don't her school computers have tools she can use?

[eos]

^ she's not at school anymore, summer vacation. not spending money would be the best option.

[Yeahman]

Scribus is open-source.

[Atealtha]

You said it can't be done half assed, so spending some money on software is the only way to go.

Scratch that, you can try ye110man's suggestion.

[ares]

After a few hundred hours or less of use, the time saved using InDesign will be worth more than the cost.

I still like Quark though I started using it before InDesign came out. and InDesign is a better program.

[ares]

Another thing about Adobe and InDesign, there are few companies that make professional apps like Adobe. If you're hardcore and really learn their apps inside-out, you'll find tons of shortcuts and tricks to make you extremely productive.

You can also automate InDesign and Quark. Quark was one of the first scriptable applications. With AppleScript on the Mac (or VB on Windows I'm guessing), you can automate complex tasks or workflows. People do this a lot in real publishing environments.

Scribus is also scriptable with Python. But if you want to lets say script stuff between your publishing app and Photoshop, that'd be more work using 2 languages.

As far as ease of use, it probably isn't even close to InDesign.

[eos]

thanks a lot for everyone's input. i told her about everything you guys said and she said she's using a trial version of page maker. i guess that works too. however i just think the problem is her procrastinating and then getting frustrated when things don't go the way she wanted them too. thanks again! =)

[ares]

akane21,

how's your sister doing with InDesign?

I started using it. I've played around with it before but never used it. My publishing days old 'ol were with Quark. I use these apps daily like before. But I started making some documents for myself, using InDesign. It really is amazing.

If your sister needs any help, she could sign up here and ask some questions.

[Atealtha]

Is it Pagemaker and not InDesign that she is using?
If so, call and see if her printer accepts Pagemaker files. I doubt it. If Pagemaker exports to PDF/X formats it could work out.

[eos]

she's using the trial version of pagemaker. i asked her if she was done with her mag and she said yes, but had a hard time sending it because it was such a large file. the printer called her today and i think there was some kind of problem but it's ok now though.