Your comments on the publishers’ website and their product’s page are spot on. I quickly eliminated some of the choices based on this criteria alone. Face value, indeed, but very relevant to the product i’m looking for. I want to get it from developers who know good design and *live* good design.

And good design done inexpensively is even better ;)

Thanks also to those who have commented and pointed out the advantages of Pages. I think I’m going to go that route and get to grips with its functionality.

Oh yes, discussions about web design and beauty …
I’m a Jakob Nielsen fan. But we will relaunch a new web design in 2010. Any suggestions are really welcome.

It has been on the market since 1986(!), started out on the Amiga and AtariST, and is available for more hardware platforms and OS versions than any other DTP app (even Amiga is still supported). Please do have a look at PageStream, since I feel it deserves much more publicity than it currently enjoys.

A universal binary is available (even classic mac is still supported).

Based on this review and the comments I’ll be looking very closely at iCalamus and Pages, but I wanted to address Scribus.

Yes, there’s a Mac port now, and yes, I have downloaded and tested it, and frankly, Scribus is not ready for prime time.

To begin, when you double-click a Scribus file in the Finder, you end up with the app splash and a blank window. If you try it again with Scribus already loaded, the file still won’t open. You must use Scribus’s built-in File menu to open extant documents on your Mac.

The open/save file dialog box is also not Finder standard; it feels very much like a port from XWindows to OSX, which it almost certainly is — not an issue for well-rounded users, but annoying.

Setting type in Scribus is extremely disappointing. It doesn’t appear to use Mac’s engine, and it doesn’t support ligatures. Also, its default font settings are used in any text frame, even if you’ve already changed the typeface and point size. (That is, if you’ve set the frame to use Caslon and you CR a couple of times to enter more type, the new text is entered in the font defaults, not the settings for that frame.) The default font is also set to manual leading. Very, very odd way of doing things.

But where Scribus really falls flat is in PDF production. Anything set to export to CMYK colorspace ends up with the colors washed and very strongly magenta. This is not true with an SVG export, but I don’t know of many print houses that can slap an SVG into a plate burner. They expect PDFs.

Also the exported documents are far too large. I created a single page file containing one scaled PDF (pure vector, about 300KB), one text frame, and one JPEG (3.5 MB) that exported to “prepress” PDF as 10+ MB of data. It was nearly 12 MB for the SVG.

This is simply not adequate for serious prepress layout. Scribus’s controls aren’t godawful, but all the interface in the world is meaningless if you can’t package a finished product suitable for print production.

Nonetheless thanks for a fine review. I’ll be adding this blog to my list of regularly-read RSS feeds.

I personally have ditched Create (because of the abysmally bad GUI and its quirky ways) and am now using Pages for peronsal layouts (of course I cannot yet rid myself of InDesign…)