Topic awaiting preservation: Switching PrePress tools

A friend of mine has been a prepress consultant for a company for many years. They had been doing their layouts using Quark on the Mac. The company required all documents to meet a predetermined style within half a point and much of the layout was done using six to eight point fonts.

Recently their IT department convinced the entire company that they should become a Windows shop and now they are requiring that all layout be done in Office-97's version of Word. This sounds crazy to me.

My friend is going nuts trying to meet the needs of the company. He just spent ten hours trying to create a seven page form. A job that would have taken three to four hour in quark.

Has anyone had any experience with this kind of a situation? Can the company reasonably expect to maintain their standards of layout using Word?




-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.

OUCH...... um.. ouch.

I can't imagine that anything but the simplest forms can be reproduced accurately in that situation. Especially asking someone who works in Quark to convert that to office and cross platform. Quark is a layout program, Word is a word processing program. They weren't meant for the same task, someone needs to beat this into the IT department with a big big stick.

The obvious solution would be to install some kind of layout and design applications that run well on windows. I believe adobe makes some kind of software that does that


It's only after we've lost everything...
That we're free to do anything...

I image if they are being that fussy, they must be doing somekind of variable form,VIPP data replacement, or laser personalzation work. Even if that's not the case and just have very high quality quality control. Word is simply not adaquate pubishing work. Yes you can place text, graphics, and images by coordinate but it's realy not acurate. Surely not enough for any kind for professional prepress workflow.

If they have an archive of existing quark files, and templates then the Windows version of QuarkXpress could be the way to go. I know Ver 4, 5 existed for windows but I am unsure if 6 is shipping or if it will.

Adobe has several publishing applications for windows InDesign, Pagemaker, FrameMaker and Corel sells Ventrua Publisher. I would avoid Pagemake a nice program but likely at the end of its development life.

I perfer InDesign and choose it if I only could have one. As most of the print world in going with a PDF workflow, InDesign is a no brainer, supports PDF natively and has a converter for version 4 and lower Quark and Pagemaker doc. The converter seem to work wells on most pages I have tried. There is some clean up to do, but save alot of work. The cool thing is we should expect version 3 somtime soon. I'm sure it will be well worth it, expecially compaired to Quark's lack luster attempts of retaining market share with version 6.

On the low end there is Microsoft Publisher and several other applications but memory fails me, most are from europe. All are geared toward the consumer or special nitch markets. Generally the consumer products produce poor of diffcult to deal with postscript so I would avoid them unless only going to say a laser printer, Docutech, or comercial Inkjet.

One could also consider Adobe Illustrator for single page forms, ad work or packaging. It is more then adaqute for many jobs. But has limited text handling and is limited to a single page per document. Illustrator while manly used for vector illustration you can also place image and raster elements. I often see packaging designs such as happy meal boxes, bags, envelopes, and point of sale displays. Corel Draw and Freehand could also be used. Thou I would be leary of any Corel products right now until the dust from the sale settles.

J. Stuart J.

I can't believe any company that had such exacting standards for layout as you have described could even contemplate moving from Quark to Word for layout.

Word is NOT a layout program - it pretends to be in that you can import graphics, but you cannot output it commercially as it will only use the RGB colour space. There are no such things as guides for positioning, and graphics tend to move around even if you do manage to get them where you want them.

But apart from all of that, your question also implies that you are not aware that you can use a Windows computer to do anything that a Mac can do. All the major graphics and layout programs have Windows versions, including Quark (ugh), InDesign, Framemaker and Pagemaker. There are also Windows versions of Illustrator, Photoshop etc. Once in any of these programs, there is no difference to the way it is used on either platform.

Obviously the company takes far too much notice of the IT dept and your friend needs to have some input into the programs used for layout. Just don't assume you can't run them in Windows.

Never let engineers name your products.
Never let engineers design your products.
Never let engineers market your products.
(Rules for successful businesses.)



If that company were my client, I would drop them. It is counter-productive to waste time on the design of desired high-quality materials with low-quality and inappropriate tools. Not only is it counter-productive but is not cost-efficient for either parties. The consultant takes a big risk to stay with such a company even if he will be paid more. As for the layout standards of the company, if they think they can maintain those standards using Word, then they're in for a big surprise called business deterioration or failure.

_________________________
A devil's work is never done.

OK guys. Thanks for your responses. I don't know if my friends company will consider switching to another product right now, but at least we have some other opinions telling us that the company is nuts for trying it and maybe we can use this as evidnce that they should consider other solutions.

Thanks.




-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.