I have been using Pagemaker for almost 7 years from now, so feel its better to review it now. I haven’t used much of Quark Express of Publisher so don’t know what they provide but I personally like to Use Photoshop & Pagemaker Combination to make my designs, In Exceptional cases I use CorelDRAW but not very often.
Basically I am Art Director in USA based publication COmpany I design Monthly Magazine (Desh-Videsh published in Florida USA) which is half Multicolor and Half two color. and as said I have been using Pagemaker to do my 70% of work and 30% of graphical/photo work in Photoshop.
Its really versatile software, I use Pagemaker 7.0 where I can setup text whatever way I want to setup, they gave some image control facilities too so just to brighten the images I don’t have to open photoshop. Several Other facilities provided like Drop Caps, Align Objects, Bullets are much needed. Specially Build Booklet which I can’t live without while making Magazine as after finishing composition I need to setup things as per booklet format for final printing which pagemaker provides as plugin, without that I would take more than 90 minutes to setup 80 pages magazine but plugin does it in less than 5 mins.
Last but not least, once I needed 1000 receipts which 1 to 1000 numbers e.g. 1 on first page receipt, 2 on second and so on, but script provided in pagemaker and using it with Frame made my job in just 2 minutes otherwise I would have pasted each number on each page and wasted more than an hour.
All and all pagemaker is good package to generate any kind of pages for graphic use coreldraw/illustrator/photoshop whatever you are confirtable with and rest pagemaker does beautifully, color separation / spot colors everything is provided to make the work really easy.
Onlything I am missing is Write text in curve format I like that kind of text and just to do that I have to use photoshop, same thing is provided in QuarkExpress, if pagemaker provides it than it will be really great, but that doesn’t bother too much except that I like pagemaker really cool (Except I really start looking at Quark Express)
Thanks
Manoj Soni