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Al Geist wondered: <<The company I work for is looking to move from
PageMaker 7.0 to InDesign. I'm part of the Marketing Department and
responsible for just about everything (corporate web site, product
technical manuals, marketing literature, product photography, morning
coffee....). Has anyone move from PageMaker to InDesign and what
problems did you encounter during the transition?>>
After having finally given up on PM 7 in frustration, I've just made
the jump myself (InDesign CS/3.0 on Mac OS-X). So I can only provide
minimal firsthand information, but so far it seems like a remarkable
product "on paper"--that is, based on the third-party book by Sandee
Cohen that I'm reading to get up to speed. My limited experimentation
thus far suggests that it's going to be a pleasure to use once I master
the basics.
I _can_ say that it produces nice PDFs and that its PageMaker import
feature is impressive, but flawed. I suspect that you'll get the best
results if you recreate your templates from scratch to take advantage
of InDesign's new features. That's generally good advice with any
program: you avoid importing any questionable design decisions
(architectural, not esthetic) from the old software that may come back
to haunt you, and you get hands-on experience with the new product.
Friends with more experience (though only up to version 2.0) tell me
that there are two main gotchas:
- How well it handles long documents isn't yet known. That is, they
haven't tested it destructively with anything really large to see if
the advertised features hold up in practice. I suspect it'll be at
least as good as PM, but not as robust as Frame for at least another
version, but have no hard evidence on which to base that--just many
years of experience with Adobe.
- Service providers (film shops, printers) were tearing out their hair
with the files produced by Version 1 (both sloppy quality control on
Adobe's end and "learning curve blues" on their end), and though they
were happier with Version 2, many still insisted on working from PDF
files instead. On the plus side, PDF is best at sending files for
printing, so that may not be a hardship.
Haven't heard any "from the trenches" reviews of CS/3.0 yet, and I'm
looking forward to hearing more from techwr-l.
--Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
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