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PM was good for long documents. Nowadays there are of course some practices which were not so important then. Colour management is whole different beast now. Now if you want to name professional but really terrible software that would be Corel Ventura.

 

 

Yep... 

 

Never heard of VivaDesigner. Claims it has been 20 years in business.. awfully well kept secret, no reviews. May be good software but PR department.. (what PR department?  :o )

 

 

 

VivaDesigner is unknown outside of Germany, I know it only because of a friend who worked with it in Berlin...

The white dog, making tools for artists, illustrators and doodlers

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Ther are 2 really feature heavy applications engineered in Germany, which I think are absolutely "first choice" under the InDesign threshhold:

VIVA Designer and the "one and only" iCalamus: https://www.icalamus.net/index.php?lan=en

 

The one-and-only was Calamus (Atari, PC) https://www.calamus.net/calamus/features_rip.php, not iCalamus (MacOS). The main idea of the (i)Calamus team is to build main application and then wait for third party software developers to make plug-ins for them. The main app is not so expencive (cca 100 EUR), but with plug-ins the PC version is 2000+ EUR. It is all-in-one app: bitmap, vector, DTP, even soft RIP [ Calamus SL owns a very save technology for output of complex publishing documents: SoftRipping®. This way Calamus prepares each single dot of each single page in your Calamus computer. Output is not controlled by external PostScript RIPs in your laser printer, typesetter or a digital RIP in China. Screen output and print output in Calamus uses the same engine (with different output hardware resolutions, of course). So Calamus offers real WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) in the physical resolution of your output machine or even higher resolution. This garanties a new quality in production.]

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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I know Calamus very well, because I worked with it for many years. Calamus was, and in many respects still is, a unbelievable piece of software. But I wrote here – and I ment it so – about iCalamus, engineered from (partially) the same team, what in my eyes is a highly sophisticated and powerful publishing application. The iCalamus team never ever has been waiting for 3rd party extensions, its a fully featured, easy to use publisher with professional intentions.

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Another almost unknown layout software is Ragtime, also developed in Germany. For some reason, german companies seem to have issues with their marketing and with getting their, mostly excellent, software out there.

Another example that comes to mind is Photoline, a pro-level competitor to PhotoShop that almost nobody knows off, they also have been in business since the 1990s.

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http://www.pl32.com/index.php

 

I work with PhotoLine.

It is very small (cca 60 Mb installed), you ran it from a stick, all-in-one app...

DTP and vector features are not as developed as bitmap, little bit confusing...

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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Same here. Never heard of VivaPublisher before Oval mentioned it on this forum. Even iCalamus escaped my attention in spite of me being in the publishing business for donkeys years.

 

I have subscribed to their (VivaPublisher) newsletter, asked for more information about its Scripting engine, which pricked my ears when I read about it, and guess what, never heard from them since. So, they either don't care or have a very small team and cannot cope.

 

But I concur with what Petar is saying. I hope that the Affinity team is willing to test all these programs and make their own stamp on all these features when working on the Publisher.

Regards

2017 27” iMac 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 • Radeon Pr 580 8GB • 64GB • Ventura 13.6.4.

iPad Pro (10.5-inch) • 256GB • Version 16.4

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Same here. Never heard of VivaPublisher before Oval mentioned it on this forum. Even iCalamus escaped my attention in spite of me being in the publishing business for donkeys years.

 

I have subscribed to their (VivaPublisher) newsletter, asked for more information about its Scripting engine, which pricked my ears when I read about it, and guess what, never heard from them since. So, they either don't care or have a very small team and cannot cope.

 

But I concur with what Petar is saying. I hope that the Affinity team is willing to test all these programs and make their own stamp on all these features when working on the Publisher.

Regards

 

+1

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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There is no VivaPublisher … perhaps the reason why you don’t get an answer. There was VivaPress in the 1990s.

 

Ups, I meant to say VivaDesigner.

I have subscribed to their newsletter on their website and so far didn't get anything.

I'm not complaining about it. I'm just narrating my experience.

Regards

2017 27” iMac 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 • Radeon Pr 580 8GB • 64GB • Ventura 13.6.4.

iPad Pro (10.5-inch) • 256GB • Version 16.4

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I found PageMaker to be a horrible product. Even non layout programs like FreeHand did a better job at layout. There was on rare case where Adobe was justified in killing off a product where they usually made bad judgement in this area (LiveMotion, FreeHand, etc.)

 

 

Yes, PM was terrible. But it started years before FH and Adobe did not really refined it. FH did not have features like pagination, baseline grid, …

 

PageMaker (which I first used in v1.2 on a Mac 512KE) was not IMHO a "horrible" or "terrible" product. When Aldus first published it in the mid 1980s there was nothing else like it. I came from a Compugraphic shop where I set galleys on photo paper, which then went to the layout guy, who waxed and pasted them down on boards with non-repro-blue guidelines. Corrections were 2-line slugs that got tipped in over the typos. Photos were indicated on the boards so that they could be shot separately with appropriate cropping and sizing, then stripped into the galley negatives. The negatives were used to make plates. And THEN you could go to press.

 

PageMaker's great (and revolutionary) strength was that it integrated all those elements onto a single virtual pasteboard, and did it all with a mouse click. It was "PageMaker the Horrible" only in the sense that it went through the printing industry like an scythe and eliminated the need for many, many crafts that were part of an older established workflow.

 

What I found horrific was Adobe's purchase of Aldus, which was more an attempt to eliminate FreeHand as a competitor to the truly horrible Illustrator (I'll retract that statement only if someone can explain to me why Illustrator STILL needs at least three different anchor-point tools for editing when FreeHand could do everything with a single, intuitive tool). When the rights instead went to Macromedia, Adobe eventually gobbled them up as well, and of course killed FreeHand. 

 

Instead of suffocating PageMaker, they put it in a development-free zone while they spent several years building InDesign from scratch. They allowed PageMaker to stay on the market, essentially a mid-1990s version, so that InDesign would shine in comparison. (And I confess, I'm a daily InDesign user, and overall it does not get in my way.) When PageMaker could no longer keep up with even the mediocrity that is Microsoft Publisher, THEN it looked horrible by comparison.

 

But, I lay all that out to make this point: PageMaker excelled at source->layout integration. And, that's what APub needs to do. That's incredibly difficult to get right, because so many elements are out of your control.

 

Affinity should not release a product until it can import and output files at least as seamlessly (for its time) as PageMaker did.

-- 

Matt

 

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If you need a DTP application, then PagePlus is still a fine product. If you need something more professional, then InDesign is also pretty good.

 

The only problem here is - There is NO Pageplus for Mac...

Mac mini M1 / Ryzen 5600H & RTX3050 mobile / iPad Pro 1st - all with latest non beta release of Affinity

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If affinity Designer had a function for double pages and one could concatenate text, it would be from my point of view a super layout program.

 

Wenn Affinity Designer eine Funktion für Doppenseiten hätte und man Text verkettenn könnte, wäre es aus meiner Sicht schon ein Super Layoutprogramm.

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Error: end tag for "snap" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified :P

Alfred, I think that comment has earned you the Geek of the Week© award.  :lol:

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.0 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Alfred, I think that comment has earned you the Geek of the Week© award.  :lol:

 

rotfl.gif

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4 (iPad 7th gen)

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Yes, just one example: the terrible drop caps feature. :(

 

Great for people who like wrong apostrophes.  ;) 

Agreed on the drop caps feature—it was primitive and out of control. 

 

Wrong apostrophes came from wrong typists. Since I came from an environment where quote marks were keyboarded as seen (no such thing as a "double quote"…that would be two keystrokes of the open quote symbol), it was always interesting to see how Pagemaker would import and interpret so-called "typewriter quotes." Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

 

But, Oval, you happened to pick on two features that did not exist elsewhere in the DTP layout world when they were introduced. Of course they were not polished. But in the late 1980s a lot of people started making a living with those tools, and a lot of other people found themselves adapting to new workflows because of them.

 

Would I say Pagemaker is a great tool today, in comparison with what's available? Absolutely not. But much of the reason that it became a "horrible" product has to do with Adobe gobbling up the Aldus corporation, freezing Pagemaker's development, and then leaving it on the market way too long. It was problematic for long-form publishing, and had its quirks, but its many competitors were always chasing its feature set.

 

And honestly, for this discussion, the main thing is integration of digital sources into a layout. Getting that right was a huge Pagemaker strength. It allowed artists, copywriters, and editors to do their work and then submit it to the layout artist working in Pagemaker. That's one of the crucial functions that Affinity Publisher has to get right.

-- 

Matt

 

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Wrong typography is not the fault of apps but the fault of the users. Typography was ignored suddenly and persistently with PageMaker. “Main thing is integration of digital sources”? Without that basic matter of course you could not sell such an app today. Professionals really need to be able to modify every bit of those sources easily. PM did not have all those tools that professional suppliers had.

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