Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
programs for the Mac?

My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
except ~ $1K programs for professionals.

Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.

I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
this is so underdeveloped.

-- Marv Frandsen

Matthew,
Oh, and I forgot to mention in my last post - thanks a lot for providing the link to what looks
like a great article (BTW, I only had time to look at the table of contents).

Having said that, I'll read the full article as soon as I have time.

Cool_X

Matthew Lybanon wrote:
> in article ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com, Marv Frandsen at
> frandsen@legalfreedom.com wrote on 6/13/05 8:25 PM:
>
>
>>Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
>>programs for the Mac?
>>
>>My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
>>writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
>>except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
>>
>>Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
>>Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
>>
>>I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
>>this is so underdeveloped.
>>
>>-- Marv Frandsen
>>
>
>
> You may want to take a look at
>
> http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
>
> That is an article entitled "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient"
>
> The article's point is that word processors combine two different functions,
> text entry and editing, and page layout, and end up not doing either as well
> as they might. The first part is easy; any simple text editor (such as
> TextEdit on an OS X Mac, or the older Simple Text, or BBEdit, or a host of
> others) will do it well. It allows you to concentrate on composition
> without being distracted by typesetting. Then you can use another program
> to handle the second function. The analogy is using a toolbox rather than a
> Swiss Army knife.
>
> The typesetting system the article's author favors is TeX. That may be a
> little more than your daughter can handle (or maybe not!), but he does tell
> you how you can get TeX free, and I think the article also gives you some
> alternatives. In any case, it's an interesting essay.
>

In article <BED459CF.60B9%lybanon@earthlink.net>,
Matthew Lybanon <lybanon@earthlink.net> wrote:

> in article ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com, Marv Frandsen at
> frandsen@legalfreedom.com wrote on 6/13/05 8:25 PM:
>
> > Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> > programs for the Mac?
> >
> > My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
> > writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
> > except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
> >
> > Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
> > Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
> >
> > I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
> > this is so underdeveloped.
> >
> > -- Marv Frandsen
> >
>
> You may want to take a look at
>
> http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
>
> That is an article entitled "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient"
>
> The article's point is that word processors combine two different functions,
> text entry and editing, and page layout, and end up not doing either as well
> as they might. The first part is easy; any simple text editor (such as
> TextEdit on an OS X Mac, or the older Simple Text, or BBEdit, or a host of
> others) will do it well. It allows you to concentrate on composition
> without being distracted by typesetting. Then you can use another program
> to handle the second function. The analogy is using a toolbox rather than a
> Swiss Army knife.
>
> The typesetting system the article's author favors is TeX. That may be a
> little more than your daughter can handle (or maybe not!), but he does tell
> you how you can get TeX free, and I think the article also gives you some
> alternatives. In any case, it's an interesting essay.

The apps you are mentioning are basically everything desktop publishing
is not. PageMaker started the revolution, enabling "normal" people to
create professional looking documents. It also completely transformed
the professional world of printing. Today we have InDesign and Quark at
the high end and pretty much nothing else. Pages is a great offering for
a sort of "Pagemaker" app for normal users and their budgets.

Windows-users have FrontPage which is probably the single most hated
file format for print shops, followed by MS Word.

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005 21:25:50 -0400, Marv Frandsen wrote
(in message <ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com>) :

> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> programs for the Mac?
>
> My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
> writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
> except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
>
> Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
> Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
>
> I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
> this is so underdeveloped.
>
> -- Marv Frandsen
>

Do you have Word? You can do some pretty good layouts using Word. I have
PageMaker but half the time anymore I use Word. Will do all I need it to do.

--
Buzz

life is too short to drink bad wine!

Marv Frandsen <frandsen@legalfreedom.com> wrote:

> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> programs for the Mac?
>
> My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
> writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
> except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
>
> Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
> Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
>
> I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
> this is so underdeveloped.
>
> -- Marv Frandsen

I haven't used it but my brother says that Pages which is part of the
iWork package from Apple does a great job with newsletters etc. Cost is
US$79

You can also get hold of a copy of Ragtime Solo from
http://www.ragtime-online.com/ It's free for non-commercial use. If you
want the dictionaries for spell checking it costs 15 Euros

Peter

--
Peter McCallum
Mackay Qld AUSTRALIA

Marv Frandsen wrote:
> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> programs for the Mac?
>

Pages, part of iWork, is considered to be a good newsletter program. It
comes with templates for newsletters of various types.

in article bjorn-9CEC42.11561514062005@news1.east.earthlink.net, Bjorn
Olsson d.a at bjorn@justingenstans.com wrote on 6/14/05 10:56 AM:

> In article <BED459CF.60B9%lybanon@earthlink.net>,
> Matthew Lybanon <lybanon@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>> in article ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com, Marv Frandsen at
>> frandsen@legalfreedom.com wrote on 6/13/05 8:25 PM:
>>
>>> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
>>> programs for the Mac?
>>>
>>> My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
>>> writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
>>> except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
>>>
>>> Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
>>> Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
>>>
>>> I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
>>> this is so underdeveloped.
>>>
>>> -- Marv Frandsen
>>>
>>
>> You may want to take a look at
>>
>> http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
>>
>> That is an article entitled "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient"
>>
>> The article's point is that word processors combine two different functions,
>> text entry and editing, and page layout, and end up not doing either as well
>> as they might. The first part is easy; any simple text editor (such as
>> TextEdit on an OS X Mac, or the older Simple Text, or BBEdit, or a host of
>> others) will do it well. It allows you to concentrate on composition
>> without being distracted by typesetting. Then you can use another program
>> to handle the second function. The analogy is using a toolbox rather than a
>> Swiss Army knife.
>>
>> The typesetting system the article's author favors is TeX. That may be a
>> little more than your daughter can handle (or maybe not!), but he does tell
>> you how you can get TeX free, and I think the article also gives you some
>> alternatives. In any case, it's an interesting essay.
>
> The apps you are mentioning are basically everything desktop publishing
> is not. PageMaker started the revolution, enabling "normal" people to
> create professional looking documents. It also completely transformed
> the professional world of printing. Today we have InDesign and Quark at
> the high end and pretty much nothing else. Pages is a great offering for
> a sort of "Pagemaker" app for normal users and their budgets.
>
> Windows-users have FrontPage which is probably the single most hated
> file format for print shops, followed by MS Word.

It might have been better if I hadn't even mentioned TeX (though the LaTeX
macros make TeX a lot easier for what you call "normal" people to use than
you seem to think), because the point of the article is independent of
specific software packages. The point is that using one program for
composition and another for page layout is better than using a word
processor for all but the simplest tasks.

It's really the same point that you make, when you mention Pagemaker and its
descendants. And it's the exact opposite of the idea that some people have,
that Micro$oft Word is the one and only answer to all questions that involve
text, or text plus pictures.

(The following may seem to be off-topic, but it really isn't. It is the
same point: The content of a document and its layout are two different
things.) This attitude produces the worst results when people attach Word
documents to email messages, which is a perfect example of using Word for
something it was not designed to do (and does poorly). Unless the contents
are something special (a mathematical formula is the example the article
cites), it's a bad idea. If you are sending me the minutes of the last
meeting to review before tonight's meeting, what do I care if the margins
are 1 inch or 1.5 inch, or if you use 12-point type instead of 10-point
type? You could sent me the same information (the part that matters) in a
file 5%-10% of the size of the Word file. This file will upload and
download (and travel from point A to point B) faster that the Word file, and
I don't need (the right version of ) a program that costs several hundred
dollars to read it.

In article <ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com>,
Marv Frandsen <frandsen@legalfreedom.com> wrote:

> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> programs for the Mac?
>
> My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
> writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
> except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
>
> Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
> Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
>
> I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
> this is so underdeveloped.
>
> -- Marv Frandsen



Marv -

I use Appleworks for that need. Does pretty much everything I need an
dthen some.

DMK

In article <ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com>,
Marv Frandsen <frandsen@legalfreedom.com> wrote:

> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> programs for the Mac?
>
> My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
> writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
> except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
>
> Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
> Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
>
> I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
> this is so underdeveloped.
>
> -- Marv Frandsen

Pages is excellent for page layout, text wrapping is easy, adding
pictures is simply drag&drop and it exports to a slew of formats. Comes
as part of iWork. The other app bundled in iWork is Keynote.

You can also use word processors like AppleWorks and MS Word, but
they're not nearly as much fun.

On 6/14/05 3:25 AM, in article
ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com, "Marv Frandsen"
<frandsen@legalfreedom.com> wrote:

> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> programs for the Mac?


Microsoft word and just about any word processor have the capabilities of
what once was called desktop publishing.

The name is gone because the genre is gone because the capacity of the word
processor was expanded to include these functions.

ej

In article <bjorn-9CEC42.11561514062005@news1.east.earthlink.net>,
"Bjorn Olsson d.a" <bjorn@justingenstans.com> wrote:

> >
> > The typesetting system the article's author favors is TeX. That may be a
> > little more than your daughter can handle (or maybe not!), but he does tell
> > you how you can get TeX free, and I think the article also gives you some
> > alternatives. In any case, it's an interesting essay.
>
> The apps you are mentioning are basically everything desktop publishing
> is not. PageMaker started the revolution, enabling "normal" people to
> create professional looking documents. It also completely transformed
> the professional world of printing. Today we have InDesign and Quark at
> the high end and pretty much nothing else. Pages is a great offering for
> a sort of "Pagemaker" app for normal users and their budgets.
>
> Windows-users have FrontPage which is probably the single most hated
> file format for print shops, followed by MS Word.

I agree with you until your last paragraph... FrontPage is a web design
program, not a (print) page design program... Maybe you're thinking of
Microsoft Publisher? (A poor-person's PageMaker that lacks a
Mac-equivalent). I know at least one Windows user whose biggest excuse
for not switching to Mac is his collection of MS-Pub documents; he could
migrate all his other documents to Mac software, but not the MS-Pub
files.

===============================================
remove 'nospam' when replying

in article ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com, Marv Frandsen at
frandsen@legalfreedom.com wrote on 6/13/05 8:25 PM:

> Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> programs for the Mac?
>
> My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
> writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
> except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
>
> Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
> Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
>
> I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
> this is so underdeveloped.
>
> -- Marv Frandsen
>

You may want to take a look at

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

That is an article entitled "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient"

The article's point is that word processors combine two different functions,
text entry and editing, and page layout, and end up not doing either as well
as they might. The first part is easy; any simple text editor (such as
TextEdit on an OS X Mac, or the older Simple Text, or BBEdit, or a host of
others) will do it well. It allows you to concentrate on composition
without being distracted by typesetting. Then you can use another program
to handle the second function. The analogy is using a toolbox rather than a
Swiss Army knife.

The typesetting system the article's author favors is TeX. That may be a
little more than your daughter can handle (or maybe not!), but he does tell
you how you can get TeX free, and I think the article also gives you some
alternatives. In any case, it's an interesting essay.

In article <sunclad-415D64.23084113062005@news.verizon.net>,
"D. Kirkpatrick" <sunclad@sunclad.com> wrote:

<snip>
>
> I use Appleworks for that need. Does pretty much everything I need an
> dthen some.
>

Speaking of which, do you know whether or not a current version of
AppleWorks will support Unicode fonts with extended character sets? I
ask because my brother's girlfriend is studying linguistics and we've
had no luck getting AppleWorks (it's the version that came with their
eMac, running OS 10.2) to accept phonetic symbols &c. from the system's
Glyphs palette -- any character that can also be entered from the
keyboard works fine, but others don't. I've suggested that she try Open
Office, but I was thinking that upgrading her existing software (which
might also require a newer OS) might solve the problem.

--
Odysseus

Matthew,
Oh, and I forgot to mention in my last post - thanks a lot for providing the link to what looks
like a great article (BTW, I only had time to look at the table of contents).

Having said that, I'll read the full article as soon as I have time.

Cool_X

Matthew Lybanon wrote:
> in article ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com, Marv Frandsen at
> frandsen@legalfreedom.com wrote on 6/13/05 8:25 PM:
>
>
>>Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
>>programs for the Mac?
>>
>>My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
>>writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
>>except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
>>
>>Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
>>Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
>>
>>I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
>>this is so underdeveloped.
>>
>>-- Marv Frandsen
>>
>
>
> You may want to take a look at
>
> http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
>
> That is an article entitled "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient"
>
> The article's point is that word processors combine two different functions,
> text entry and editing, and page layout, and end up not doing either as well
> as they might. The first part is easy; any simple text editor (such as
> TextEdit on an OS X Mac, or the older Simple Text, or BBEdit, or a host of
> others) will do it well. It allows you to concentrate on composition
> without being distracted by typesetting. Then you can use another program
> to handle the second function. The analogy is using a toolbox rather than a
> Swiss Army knife.
>
> The typesetting system the article's author favors is TeX. That may be a
> little more than your daughter can handle (or maybe not!), but he does tell
> you how you can get TeX free, and I think the article also gives you some
> alternatives. In any case, it's an interesting essay.
>

In article <BED459CF.60B9%lybanon@earthlink.net>,
Matthew Lybanon <lybanon@earthlink.net> wrote:

> in article ymqre.86182$VH2.40025@tornado.tampabay.rr.com, Marv Frandsen at
> frandsen@legalfreedom.com wrote on 6/13/05 8:25 PM:
>
> > Whatever happened to affordable, for-the-rest-of-us desktop publishing
> > programs for the Mac?
> >
> > My daughter has reached that time in her life when its time to start
> > writing newsletters. But I am having a very hard time finding anything
> > except ~ $1K programs for professionals.
> >
> > Wasn't ordinary person publishing a Mac niche, once upon a time?
> > Apparently it has been mostly abandoned.
> >
> > I settled for a $20 shareware. We'll see how it goes. I can't believe
> > this is so underdeveloped.
> >
> > -- Marv Frandsen
> >
>
> You may want to take a look at
>
> http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
>
> That is an article entitled "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient"
>
> The article's point is that word processors combine two different functions,
> text entry and editing, and page layout, and end up not doing either as well
> as they might. The first part is easy; any simple text editor (such as
> TextEdit on an OS X Mac, or the older Simple Text, or BBEdit, or a host of
> others) will do it well. It allows you to concentrate on composition
> without being distracted by typesetting. Then you can use another program
> to handle the second function. The analogy is using a toolbox rather than a
> Swiss Army knife.
>
> The typesetting system the article's author favors is TeX. That may be a
> little more than your daughter can handle (or maybe not!), but he does tell
> you how you can get TeX free, and I think the article also gives you some
> alternatives. In any case, it's an interesting essay.

The apps you are mentioning are basically everything desktop publishing
is not. PageMaker started the revolution, enabling "normal" people to
create professional looking documents. It also completely transformed
the professional world of printing. Today we have InDesign and Quark at
the high end and pretty much nothing else. Pages is a great offering for
a sort of "Pagemaker" app for normal users and their budgets.

Windows-users have FrontPage which is probably the single most hated
file format for print shops, followed by MS Word.