I am delighted with QuarkXPress 4.1 running on a G4 with the big Apple Cinema monitor. Quark gives complete control over typography and layout; the program shows all images and illustrations in position on the page. Images and illustrations can be resized and cropped right there. Quark uses lower-resolution mock-ups of the images,which are linked to the high-resolution versions behind Quark in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. The large, flat screen on the Cinema monitor shows the full double-page spread of my book, with enough space around the sides for all the computer administrative debris also.

Quark is widely used for good book design, magazine design, and advertising layouts. Nearly all graphic design students have skills in Quark.And surely just about every printing company can read Quark files.

About 8 months ago, I started using Quark for writing and designing my new book. I am delighted. I wrote 2 books in Word 4.0 on the Mac; I stayed with 4.0 for about 10 years because later versions of Word were slow, slow to boot even, clunky, over-featured, and cranky on the Mac. Also we hacked Word 4.0 to get a wonderful thesaurus (called Big Thesaurus) into the menu bar, much better than any Microsoft or Quark thesaurus then or now

In a sense, Quark has become my operating system. Essentially the user in Quark is mainly seeing only documents. That is what I want to see. I have no interest in applications or operating systems; my interest is in documents. Each document has text, tables, diagrams, and images; thus I'm thinking content, not applications. In fact, why should users care about applications?! Or operating systems? Users mostly care about documents; this is how computer interfaces should be designed. Some of the early graphical user interfaces (Metaphor, for example) were based on documents and had no separate applications or operating system from the user's point of view. Documents had property sheets with links to the appropriate underlying tools for working with words, tables, images, or whatever. The document itself showed everything in position.

Interfaces have been made inconvenient by computer companies selling applications and operating systems; their economic needs play out on our interface, by giving us apps and operating systems instead of documents.

At any rate, I think Quark (which is a big, complicated program that takes some work to learn) is superb and is a very good way to structure an interface by documents. I wish it had Big Thesaurus however! I've gone back to a pile of 3 books--thesauri--for looking up words now that I'm writing in Quark.

-- Edward Tufte, June 26, 2001

I've had great success with FrameMaker. The best software package depends a lot on what you are trying to do. For long, technical documents with lots of data tables (the type I have done) FrameMaker is terrific. It easily integrates graphics and allows basic graphic editing and drawing. It is not nearly as powerful as Illustrator, but is more than adequate for the types of graphs that I need. It allows full control of line width, shading, etc. It also includes a Thesaurus.

-- Bernie Bonn (email), August 22, 2001

In the name of completeness, I would like to mention Adobe InDesign. Adobe targeted this product directly at Quark users, so it tries to supply the same functionality. I cannot comment on which is better as I am a PC user and Quark is not available on this platform. The reason I think it is important to bring up in this discusion is that InDesign has an incredible text formatting engine. I have seen it format text into incredibly complicated, even curved, spaces, the results look natural and are very readable. Every aspect of text spacing can be manually controlled (if you want). It also supports optical margins, the algorithms behind which I can not even begin to ponder, but the output is gorgeous. Integration of text and image is fully support of course.

Certainly worth a look, you can get a free demo from Adobe.

Framemaker is probably the most competent word processor and document manager that exists (PC-centric comment), and the only thing I would use for large documents. Now if Adobe would only integrate the text and image formatting of InDesign with the large document capabilities of Framemaker, we would have an incredible package.

-- Reynold Dodson (email), September 25, 2001

I'd like to add Pagemaker to the list of 'Document' programs. With version 5 and later, it has substantial publishing & editing capabilities including graphics and pretty fancy text.

I've used it for 200 page program documentation, newsletters, and short booklets. Single, two sided, four up is available thru built in additions. Scripting is another useful feature I have used to convert and import 40+ chapter novels (in Wordstar!) in a single operation at computer speeds.

The ability to add tags (<tagname>) in raw text and on import, automatically apply type styles by that name makes creating good looking documents from raw text quite easy. Creating Table of Contents and a useful Index is also straightforward.

While tools such as InDesign, Quark and Framemaker are very powerful in this area, Pagemaker is capable of handling 95% of all of those tasks quite well. For most people, you will run out of needs before Pagemaker runs out of capabilities.

I have a friend who uses Pagemaker for layouts of complex panel or equipment designs with high accuracy requirements and large sizes.

Probably the most important need with any of these tools is a good large monitor, with color adjustment if you work with color prints. Nineteen inch is minimum, twenty one is better, and the big flat screens are nirvana if you can afford one.

-- Bill Nicholls (email), December 5, 2001

Quark XPress certainly is available for Windows, if you need it.

-- Aaron Priven (email), April 23, 2002

Years ago I worked for Xerox Desktop Software which had bought Ventura Publisher from it's developers. Of course they killed it with corporate mismanagement (charging $695 for an add-on that added tables and equations, just when Word Perfect added those items at no additional cost). In it's day a good program and still available from Corel.

Now I am using InDesign, which coupled with tight PhotoShop integration, works great for text & figure integration. The extensive on screen palettes (which you can hide by hitting the Tab key) make very large or dual monitors a practical necessity. My solution was to add a Zenith 15" HDTV / monitor combo to my desktop just to hold the palettes, so size and resolution was not that important. An additional plus is being able to watch TV during periods of writer's block.

Too bad that Microsoft ordered Apple to 'knife the baby' that was OpenDoc as this would have been just what Mr. Tufte wanted as far as a document centric application that pulled in modules (such as thesaurus) to help compose text.

-- Aphelion (email), December 1, 2002

I'd be very interested in seeing specific credible evidence on Microsoft's response to OpenDoc. If there is evidence, can someone please point me to it?

Thanks

ET

-- Edward Tufte, December 1, 2002

This looks like it went down quite a while ago...

THE VALLEY VS. MICROSOFT

FORTUNE

Monday, March 20, 1995

By Brenton Schlender

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,376397,00.html

Excerpt: 'Mr. Gates [also] threatened that Microsoft might cease developing application software for the Macintosh platform if Apple continues its development of OpenDoc...Since Microsoft is the largest supplier of software applications for the Macintosh, this threat was a serious one.'

-- Peter Lauterbach (email), February 9, 2003

LaTeX is well worth learning, but the learning curve is a bit steep, and getting really beautiful results will take a bit of work to figure out. It is, however, almost infinitely flexible -- LaTeX is a set of macros that sit atop TeX, and TeX is a Turing- complete programming language, so anything that can be programmed could, theoretically, be written in TeX and implemented as LaTeX macros.

LaTeX is especially useful if your writing involves a lot of mathematical equations. There are few tools that can format mathematics as simply and powerfully as TeX.

LaTeX is similar to (X)HTML in that encourages you to concentrate on the structure and content of your writing rather than fiddle with presentation. At the same time, its programmability gives you the power to make your typeset work come out exactly as you'd like it.

There are free and shareware TeX systems (including LaTeX) available for all the major operating systems, so giving it a try isn't that expensive. It will take you a while to learn the ins and outs, and you'll be glad of Google for help with some of the more complicated and less obvious tricks.

-- Claire Connelly (email), December 13, 2003

The TeX showcase has some nice examples produced with plain TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt, MetaPost, ... (La)TeX requires some important learning investment but if you need to produce a lot of documents it may be one of the best bets you can make. Not having a WYSIWYG interface (although there are some available now) is not necessarily a drawback for efficiency; sometimes quite the opposite: except for beginners, it's much faster to write $\sqrt{x^3+\sin\theta}$ than to visit a lot of menu entries again and again. I've been using it since 1989 (starting with some of the earliest PCs with 8086 and 80286 CPUs and 10-20MB hard disks, under MS-DOS...). For a long time now it has perhaps been one of the most versatile, robust and bug-free text processing systems available.

A typical problem with graphics packages (such as plotting programs) is their limited flexibility to produce text to be integrated in diagrams. Pages 33 and 34 of "Using Imported Graphics in LaTeX 2e" exemplify how, using LaTeX package PSfrag, one can replace strings in a previously created PostScript figure with arbitrary LaTeX text/math.

-- J M Esteves (email), December 14, 2003

I have used an earlier version of Adobe's InDesign to produce a series of advertising postcards, and found it pretty easy to pick up and learn the basic aspects of text layout and positioning. Compared to Pagemaker, which does not seem to have an "undo" feature, it was a good experience.

I became quite enthralled with a feature-by-feature comparison at arstechnica.com of Quark and Indesign, conducted by an avid Quark devotee, and recommend it highly to anyone who needs to choose between the two, or anyone interested in user interface design. As a bonus, about six or seven pages in, it has one of the funniest equations I have seen.

http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/003/software/indesign/ indesign-1.html

-- George Girton (email), December 14, 2003

Today, a group of 3 software companies: Nisus, The Omni Group, and Blacksmith, announced a new open source initiative for Mac OS X, Linkback (http:// www.linkbackproject.org). From their site:

"LinkBack is an open source framework for Mac OS X that helps developers integrate content from other applications into their own. A user can paste content from any LinkBack-enabled application into another and reopen that content later for editing with just a double-click. Changes will automatically appear in the original document again when you save."

It looks like they're trying to bring the focus back to the document, and away from the application. Hopefully more developers will incorporate this into their software.

-- Neil Cadsawan (email), March 4, 2005

Indesgin. Indesign and Illustrator is all you need. Indesign is miles ahead of quark, and quark is an unresponsive coporate slug. Buy the Adobe Creative Suite and you'll be happy.

-- Jason Warriner (email), March 17, 2005

Check out Pages by Apple for an easy-to-use layout program.

http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/

-- nivi (email), March 22, 2005

As I mentioned in another post recently, here is a template that I developed for the Pages "word processor" by Apple.

http://www.nivi.com/iwork/template.pdf

http://www.nivi.com/iwork/template.pages.zip (native Pages file format)

I tried to steal as much as possible from Tufte's books. It is obviously not at the level of a Tufte book but the goal was to get 80% of the way there for 20% of the effort.

Lots of obvious issues with the templates but feedback is welcome.

Feel free to use or modify the template if you like it.

NOTE: If you don't have Bembo, you will not be able to properly view the .pages file although the .pdf will render fine. I used an old version of Bembo I had lying around. It might have been from the Adobe Font Folio. If you don't have Bembo I suggest trying Palatino which I believe comes with current Macs. Or buy a copy of Bembo. Or beg E.T. to make ETBembo publicly available.

-- Nivi (email), March 23, 2005

That ol' time rag, baby.

Typographically speaking, a narrow measure (line length) calls for rag right, not justified. The word spacing is otherwise clunky and objectionable. Then there are the problems of line-ending orphans and widows. What's wanted is a good in-out rag...one line ends short (in), next line ends long (out). Best to follow ET on this one, but not bad for 20% effort.

-- Ps & Qs (email), March 24, 2005

Unfortunately the justified right algorithm in Pages is poor. I agree it is probably best to go right rag.

I don't think the issue is with narrow columns though. The New York Times has justified right with narrow columns and it looks pretty good.

Pages also cannot automagically deal with widows/orphans within a paragraph. But it does deal with widows/orphans on a page level.

Perhaps some people would deal with widows/orphans by hand but that obviously doesn't work with documents that are constantly being re-edited.

-- Nivi (email), March 25, 2005

This is a useful thread so I am revisiting to add some grieving and also an update for LaTeX.

OpenDoc - It was such a tragedy that it was lost, stabbed, or whatever.

Latex. There is now a wysiwym front end to Tex files the open-source LyX project. I used this last September to do a graphics rich document and I cannot praise it enough. It gives you a view like a page view in MS Word (i.e. graphics appear on screen although they are just links to files in the document) and is much easier to write in than a text editor with lots of LaTeX markup showing. There are builds for Linux, Windows and Max OS X. No announcement on the iPAD as yet.

Best strength? For me the live (soon to be editable) outline toolbar - which can float or be docked. This is really great for working in biggish documents (you can move sections there) and it stays open when you go back to the detailed view. Second is - it does not let you type two spaces in next to each other, nor does it allow extra blank lines. This saves a lot of repeat editing just before you print..

Worst weakness: No live spell check. This is due to be fixed in the next version. Get it and try it at: www.lyx.org

My take on the learning curve is Word also has it - it is just postponed to when you start to make your document look uniform and with figures where you want. And then when you look in your document it is very hard to find why some bits are differently formatted. In contrast with LaTeX it takes some time to find the right document class and then some installing ensues. But this is an easier process than downloading Word templates and wrestling with them.

And there is a Tufte-book article & report classes that make a layout close to the four famous horsemen, with marginal pictures , full width etc. very good looking results. get it here (with examples). It is supported by LyX. http://code.google.com/p/tufte-latex/

(this tools is mentioned elsewhere on AskET - but a cross ref doesn't hurt.

DaveG

-- DaveG (email), March 29, 2010

E.T.: Your mention of Metaphor sparked my curiosity to learn about it. Alas, searching for an interface with such a name has proved quite difficult. Could you provide some pointers or links?

I've long dreamed of the day when software designers will finally realize how inhumane applications are and will move us back into an object-centric model. Jef Raskin got it, you get it, but it seems that most people don't. I don't get it! From what I can tell, the original Xerox Alto did not expose applications to the user either. It's a shame that GUIs from the '70s used metaphors more fit for human beings than modern GUIs. Hence, I would love to read more about Metaphor.

Thanks.

-- David (email), April 1, 2010