On Saturday, October 29, 2016 at 6:59:26 PM UTC-5, Fishface wrote:
I just upgraded my personal (Windows) copy of QuarkXpress version 4.x because they let me
upgrade this 19 year old software for $350. I have wrestled with various versions at work on
the Mac, but I have to say, this version is quite impressive. Unfortunately, the Mac Pro 1,1
at work won't run it with Snow Leopard, and officially can't be upgraded past Lion, so we're
stuck at version 9.1.
I found an ad on craigslist which teases at a solution for upgrading this old but good running
dual Xeon beast to El Capitan. What do you think, is it worth doing? I have an old ATI HD 4870
already that I could flash. Here's the link to the ad:
http://portland.craigslist.org/clk/sys/5821171105.html
What do you think?
And where did everyone go? Is usenet about dead? To which web forums do you people
subscribe? I have the Quark and Adobe, but what else am I missing? I tried a web search for
"Del Tree" but all I find is old stuff. It's ok to reply months or years later, I'll see it, and I won't
even have to scroll down!
Unless one has significant means to update Quark's programmatic interfaces - and it's ability to produce pre-press compliant PDFs for print, it's dead.
The real driver for InDesign is process automation - how can you automate the production tools, what can you port over to other projects once the first design pass is complete. Can you get your colour palettes out for illustrator and web-based projects,
can you do database-driven digital printing, etc.
For non-InDesign based projects, my fallback now is Scribus (
https://www.scribus.net/), the open source page layout package. I use this with Inkscape and GIMP and get some pretty decent results out of it. Documentation automation is being driven by
software sector needs - haven't dropped in to check on it yet.
Fallback for pro use is Adobe - but if you're working on a budget and know what you're doing, you can get really good results out of the open source packages.
My area of interest is currently automating conversion and download of web-based materials to print (where needed).
And Usenet? It depends on the user forum. I'm still in touch with two interest communities that started there. One has gone to Facebook and the other has most recently kinda-ported to Slack.
Hope that helps,
Shirley Hicks
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