Print Design & Layout Reviews

Review: QuarkXPress 8

QuarkXPress users will welcome many of the changes in XPress 8, and may even delight in a few of them.

Reviews: Font Manager Face-Off

We pit eight Mac and Windows font managers against each other. Who will win the fight?

Review: Adobe InDesign CS3

Go ahead...make my layout. This new version makes short work of design and production tasks across the board.

Review: HVC Color Composer

This Photoshop plug-in adds an intuitive color selection tool that will save time and money -- once you grasp its complexity.

Review: Five InDesign Plug-Ins

Adobe InDesign has a lot of features, but for some specific tools, you need a plug-in. These five plug-ins, with prices from free to $100, will help you prepare print files, share styles, and more.

Review: Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional

More for the Office, Less for Creative Pros.

Review: Quark Print Collection

Its imposition and marking tools for QuarkXpress or Adobe Acrobat are top-notch, and its price is surprisingly low. Do you need this new bundle of tricks?

Review: Quark Interactive Designer 1.0

A long quest for a simple, easy-to-learn Flash program is over. Or is it?

Review: QuarkXPress 7

In many ways, it's a great leap forward. In other ways, it falls short. Is the new version enough to keep current XPress users in the Quark fold? Can it even entice some people back from InDesign?

Review: Adobe InDesign CS2

Should you buy the new InDesign? Here's the lowdown on the new features, who they benefit, and whether the price is right.

Adobe Acrobat 7 Professional

Adobe released a new version of its Acrobat software. Is the upgrade worth $449? Read on for a firsthand look at the pros and cons.

The Digital Dish: Plugging PageMaker into InDesign

Loyal PageMaker fans shed a tear when Adobe announced it was discontinuing the application. But PageMaker lives on as a set of plug-ins for InDesign. What do you get? Sandee Cohen takes a look.

Adobe FrameMaker 7.1: Fast Software for Long Documents

Producers of technical documentation have long sung the praises of Adobe FrameMaker, but other print designers may wonder what's the big deal. That may change with FrameMaker 7.1, which includes powerful QuarkXPress and PageMaker filters and whizzy conditional-text features.

InDesign CS: Adobe Ups the Ante Once Again

Page layout these days is a high-stakes poker game full of bidding, bluffing, and raking in the chips. With the release of InDesign CS, Adobe adds new features that may make users of other programs throw in their cards. Should you join the game? Sandee Cohen has the answer in her review.

QuarkXPress 6.0: A Safe Upgrade in Dangerous Times

QuarkXPress's perch on top of the page-layout heap has long been undisputed. But with increased competition from InDesign, the pressure is on Quark to produce an upgrade that secures its standing. Does QuarkXPress 6.0 deliver? Gene Gable reviews the Mac OS X version of XPress.

Corel Ventura 10: Powerhouse Publishing for PCs

Often left in the shadows of bigger names, Corel Ventura 10 is a heavyweight desktop publishing program for all types of documents. With XML and PDF support, this venerable program can stand up with the rest.

Hands On With Adobe InDesign 2.0

After many hours of pouring over the program I've come to find that it surpasses InDesign 1.5 in both feature set, and ease of use, and has entered the realm of "crucially important tool" along with Photoshop, Illustrator and the former king of the DTP hill, Quark.

Come to Order: FrameMaker 7 Gives Structure to Documents

Adobe FrameMaker 7 is a different kind of layout program than QuarkXPress or InDesign. With its strong layout tools FrameMaker excels at long-document production then adds extensive XML support for creating structured documents.

QuarkXPress 5: Moving Ahead or Falling Behind?

InDesign 2.0: Where Creativity and Productivity Meet

I divide using a page-layout program into two distinct experiences. The first part is the creative experience. This is when a designer or art director uses a page-layout program as part of the initial design process. InDesign 2.0 excels here.