Re: Adobe commits suicide
Quote:
Originally Posted by
pauland
...Adobe has no clear rival that I can see.
It's that pervasive thinking that Adobe is best at, not their software. Mistaking market share for software excellence pervades the marketplace.
Microsoft also bought their way to market dominance. Better word processors, spreadsheet applications and db managers went the way of the dodo because of it.
And Quark? I'll wager more publications were laid out in Ventura during the years it was alive than QXP and PM combined. It's db publishing was used widely.
It too was killed off, but even its last Corel version has features that ID will never have.
All the foregoing ramble is to say that one doesn't need to make a better mousetrap. One just needs to garner more market share to "win."
Re: Adobe commits suicide
I miss Ventura. Ended up using Framemaker for long documents. But Ventura was one sweet program.
Re: Adobe commits suicide
Wow I remember ventura from the eighties. Anyway this thread just shows the, well if not importance then the impact of adobe on the design community, 53 replies and counting.
Re: Adobe commits suicide
Re: Adobe commits suicide
I don't think the Adobe's approach of a forced cloud subscription is going to end up good.
I am staying away from Adobe products and will start implementing other software in my business workflow.
If you want to read more, Check out this blog. I personally think its time to fire Adobe and move on to other software like Xara, Corel, etc. There are many options.
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2013/05...html#more-9251
Re: Adobe commits suicide
@Pauland -- Framemaker, arguably the least graphics-oriented DTP program ever devised, actually does one thing quite well. It lets you embed Flash SWF animations right into the PDF, right on the page. Embedded, not linked to. This can make for very interesting ebooks, where you can view the animations on screen, but also print them out with a fully graphical page layout... headers, footers, all that... with the animation showing only the first Flash frame. You can see the Flash pieces in Acrobat Reader, but not with other PDF viewers, like Apple Preview.
Beyond that, I've seen tech writers actually make 2500-page PDFs with Framemaker. Better than Word!
Re: Adobe commits suicide
FrameMaker was the first DTP program I ever used. I remember using it to create course notes for a training course I was asked to teach. All the fun of duplicating boxes and putting a black one under a white one to fake shadows.
I really liked the program.
Re: Adobe commits suicide
So what's your recommendation -- if Ventura's gone, and InDesign's too costly, is there a good DTP program out there that can output decent PDFs, and can handle, say, a 100-pg document? What are people using for DTP if we rule out InDesign, Word, OpenOffice Writer... and Framemaker? Is Microsoft Publisher still around... and is it worth using?
Re: Adobe commits suicide
@jon404 -
If I ever clean my basement office, I may actually find the install disks for my last copy of Ventura... :)
MS Publisher still exists -- MS is currently offering Microsoft Publisher 2013 for sale. I understand they've added quite a number of features to this latest version -- might be worth your time to check it out.
Word is...an interesting proposition. I've used pretty much every version of MS Word, beginning in about 1987 when it was truly an awful product, and WordPerfect was kicking it's a**. To this day, it still has some annoying quirks -- but once you learn these, you can make it sing and dance pretty effectively. I missed the part of this thread where Word was ruled out as a contender for your interests (or was it?); if doc length is the concern, even as long as 6 or 7 years ago, there were noted examples of Word managing documents as long as 10,000 pages (no typo there). I have used it to prepare and manage docs well over 100 pages with multiple sections, complex tables and numbering references to external documents, loads of embedded media, etc. It definitely slows down as the document gets big and filled with images -- some of the tricks that help you get past this include use placeholders for images and only rendering when you're in print preview mode. It helps to have a large fast hard drive and lots of working RAM too. You definitely don't have the level of control that a commercial professional DTP program offers -- but I'm curious: what features do you need that Word doesn't include?
You might also take a look at:
- Scribus
- Serif Page Plus
Re: Adobe commits suicide
Thanks Jon -- I'm over on the amateur side these days. Since retiring, I've written three books, using Framemaker and Open Office Writer. Will NEVER bother with producing a print book ever again... too much work for too little money. After several years, am now getting 70% of sales from PDFs sold via my own website... 20% from Kindle, and 10% from print -- Amazon and bookstores.
So the next one I write will be designed for PDF delivery from the start, leaving printing to the customer. This frees me up to write a book of any size, without having to calculate the page count 'sweet spot' between printing costs and sale price. Or bother with the print-book sales channel, although Ingram, Lightning Source, Amazon and Barnes & Noble have been straightforward to deal with.
So back to DTP software. PDF output means I can make highly graphical pages. Integrated images and text. Went out to the garage earlier and dug out old Microsoft Publisher 2007. It should work... has the same graphics controls as PowerPoint, which are quite useful. Yes, they have a new version, for about US $100... but I'm not sure if I need it. We'll see.
As to MS Word. Before retiring, I did multimedia design at Qualcomm in San Diego, California. Most of the tech writers used Framemaker. Job security; nobody else could understand its intricacies. The engineers refused to use it, and passed in their documents in Word. And we had several people... like you... who were brilliant at getting the most out of Word. But they were totally sneered at by the Frame writers, some still on UNIX boxes, who never could understand that their Type 1 Courier font wasn't the same as the Courier New used by the engineers on their documents.
Anyway, we'll see how MS Publisher works out. Between Xara products, old Photoshop 7, and a few useful utilities, I'm all set!
Jon Donahue