Software Suitability

Choose the right program for the job :-


Professional page make-up programs, all these are OK

• CorelDraw  Probably the worlds best drawing/illustration package. Often contains different irritating bugs in different versions. Versatile and reliable with a huge feature set
• Adobe Illustrator  The industry standard EPS/PDF editor. Less intuitive than Corel and usually has less features but certainly an excellent choice for jobs containing only a few small pages.
• Freehand Another excellent drawing and illustration package - now also owned by Adobe. Handles large multi-page jobs very well for a drawing program
• Quark Xpress   The industry standard page layout program. Very good at what it does but you will need a separate drawing program. Highly overpriced and the Windows versions have been a bit flakey in the past. Excellent for large projects
• Adobe Pagemaker   A very good page layout program. Not particularly good with imported PDF files.
• Serif Pageplus   The bargain basement page layout program. Totally excellent value for money and better at some things than the high priced market leaders. Unsuitable prior to version 10. It's British made too.
• Adobe InDesign  This is probably now the market leading page layout program. Excellent at most things and designed to interface seamlessly with Adobe's other related products - Illustrator and Photoshop.

Professional bitmap editing

• Adobe Photoshop  If you are producing artwork for print this is definitely the one to go for.

Other (possibly) less suitable programs

• The Gimp  Bitmap editing for free. This is the standard on Unix/Linux systems and is available as a free download for Mac and Windows. We only have superficial experience with this program but it seems OK
• MsPublisher  On the surface this may seem like a professional program for producing artwork for print. It isn't. It can be used but it's native colour space is RGB which means you will never have true colour control.
• MsWord  Not really suitable because it is a word processor not a desktop publishing package.
• Microsoft Works  Don't go there.
• Microsoft Excell and Powerpoint  Not at all suitable but we have known people use them.