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Choose 8 programs for magazine layout. The best programs for layout of magazines and newspapers. Comparison of Scribus layout design program with paid analogue Adobe InDesign

Layout programs

There are several computer programs, intended for electronic layout. Which one to choose in a particular case is decided by the publisher and (or) layout designer depending on the type of layout (type of publication), as well as on the basis of experience, guided by considerations of convenience.

Many programs have been developed to create multi-page layouts. Among them are Adobe products (PageMaker, Frame Maker, InDesign), as well as QuarkXPress, Corel Ventura Publisher, TeX. They all have their own characteristics and may be optimal in different cases.

If the source text has a heterogeneous structure, it often contains formulas, tables and other complicating elements, then it is better to type it up using Ventura Publisher, TeX or FrameMaker. They help automate text formatting.

If the text is more uniform, but you have to insert pictures, then XPress, PageMaker, and InDesign programs are suitable for its layout. They are successfully used in book, newspaper, magazine and advertising layouts.

What is the best program to use to make layouts for publishing a book? Opinions may vary, but first of all you should pay attention to InDesign and Xpress programs. Each of them has its own advantages, but experienced layout designers often prefer InDesign for book layout.

Layout of business, technical and scientific magazines is done in FrameMaker. For layout of illustrated magazines and catalogs, it is advisable to use InDesign.

In principle, text Microsoft program Word can be used for layout. Once you install the necessary add-ons, many functions of special software products - PageMaker, XPress or InDesign - will become available in Word. Some publications are systematically laid out in this way, but still this is not the best way and not the most professional solution. A program originally designed for layout will always be more convenient. But in the end, the most important thing is how the reader perceives the book, and we must focus primarily on readability, no matter what program is used.

Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign is one of the largest software products from Adobe Systems. Its direct purpose is publishing, which includes the design and layout of documents for various purposes. Manufacturers called InDesign the successor and direct successor of the functions of the Adobe PageMaker program. First of all, the program is intended for designers and layout designers - both those working in professional studios and individual creative people. WITH using Adobe InDesign can be used to design any periodical or book publication.

In addition to printing, it allows you to export finished documents to the current PDF format and other formats, preserving all the variety of designs and unique design solutions. InDesign was the first of its kind to combine so many publishing functions into one. In addition to integration with other Adobe products: Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat, it allows you to use Unicode fonts for design, that is, thousands of character options.

Also in the Indesign arsenal are the most modern transparency functions and visual special effects, styling and the use of OpenType fonts, as well as optical layout alignment and cross-platform scripts for electronic documents.

Last Adobe version InDesign includes features such as access to Adobe servers for publishing content designed for tablets; an article palette for managing a document without changing the layout; ability to add to electronic documents sound and video recordings, and much more.

Software for desktop systems Adobe InDesign is an all-in-one content publishing application that gives you precise, pixel-level control over your design and typography. Create stylish, expressive pages for print, tablet PCs, and other screens. Easily adapt layouts to different page formats, orientations, and devices while maintaining high image quality.

Create layouts in Adobe InDesign that automatically adapt to screens and pages different sizes, using the Liquid Layout feature for .folio files. Use the Alternate Layout feature to gain more control over your workflow. Increase your productivity with features like related content, content collection tools, recently used fonts list, grayscale viewing, and more.

"Liquid" layout

Easily design and create multiple layout versions for various devices and printed materials in one InDesign file.

Quark Xpress

I'm not particularly familiar with the history of this company, but the program is not bad. To this day, newspapers and magazines use version 4 (version 8 already exists) because of its simplicity. Support for Russian is NOT built-in and must be installed separately, and for each version. Without additional installations word hyphens will not work,

and when layout of magazines and newspapers Without word hyphens, nothing will work, so if you are going to layout your newspaper or magazine at home, it is better not to use Quark - you will have to install a lot, and this will require additional knowledge and time.

Adobe Indesign

Adobe Indesign is a program from the software market dinosaur that created Photoshop. The previous program was called PageMaker. Problems arise during installation, of course, and every time there are some new ones, but this best program of a kind. The Russian language is built-in, I’m talking about the ability to hyphenate words. I started working in Indesign already knowing Quark very well (I could work practically without a mouse - on the keyboard), and even this point was taken into account by the creators: in Indesing you can install keyboard shortcuts from Quark Exrpress 4.0 (though they are only approximately similar, but you quickly get used to it) ).

In order for all these programs to install and work well, it is necessary to put the fonts in order. To do this, install some kind (the most famous is Adobe Font Manager). " Broken fonts» come across quite often, often the broken font turns out to be Arial (one of the main ones in Windows). That is, this is naturally not visible to the eye - the font itself and the font work great in Word, for example, but some characters are not “drawn” correctly and Indesign simply does not install or does not start after installation.

Well, the most important thing! Programs for layout of newspapers and magazines ( By the way, in Quark Express and Indesign you can assemble any layouts for printing: flyers, posters, brochures, booklets) This programs for working with text but not with photos, or for arranging text and photos. These programs do not have tools for photo editing, so at least one more mandatory program is Adobe Photoshop, which prepares all raster graphics for your publication.

We can say that it is slightly behind its vector brothers Inkscape and Scribus, which today allow you to work with color at a professional level. I'll talk about the true open publishing system Scribus, which provides professional tools for layout and design and at the same time works on a wide variety of hardware and software platforms.

I'm not guilty! He came himself!

Those who are familiar with the world of Unix, but have not yet heard of Scribus, may think that we are talking about another variation on the TeX/LaTeX/LyX theme. No! These programs, although called publishing, do not provide a full-fledged WYSIWYG interface. Scribus, written in 2001 by self-taught German programmer Franz Schmidt, was the first to enter the unplowed field of industrial-grade open publishing systems.

The main idea of the Scribus program is to use technological processes and standards developed by Adobe. Of course we're talking about about PostScript and PDF. Moreover, it is the latter that is used in work and when saving a file. Therefore, whatever one may say, Adobe unwittingly became the initiator of the emergence of a wonderful open program for layout and design. Unable to cope with temptation, Scribus changed open formats(like SVG) in favor of an industry standard. There is no excuse for him, he really came on his own!

However, I personally think that Schmidt's idea to create a layout and design program based on PDF technology is simply brilliant. Even then it was clear that this format would become the de facto standard for documents that look the same on any hardware and software platform and when printed. Adobe regularly releases PDF viewers for the most popular platforms, including Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

Franz Schmidt's project received support among programmers, and the Scribus program gained well-deserved popularity among Linux users. The program was then ported to Windows, Mac OS X and some other systems. There is now a well-established simultaneous release of new versions of this program for three leading operating systems(Windows, Linux and Mac OS X) is a source of particular pride for the development team.

Strike the iron without leaving the cash register!

To ensure iron-clad reliability and portability of your documents, I recommend that you install Ghostscript, an open and free PostScript and PDF interpreter, without wasting any time.

Scribus's import and export functions take full advantage of the Ghostscript interpreter. Export to PDF is simply great: the pre-launch check function will help identify any errors and ensure that the files are generated PDF versions 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5 are excellent quality. At the same time, you will gain a huge number of special features: encryption, creation of input fields and even presentation effects. But that's not all! The most interesting feature of this program is that you can not only export the file to PDF, but also open it for editing! Didn't I say that the program works in this format?

Calm down, let's all sit down!

Find mutual language The program is not as difficult as it might seem at first glance; every sane user can do it. The program interface is quite logical and completely Russified - the Russian language is indicated during the installation process. During installation, Scribus will ask if you have a Ghostscript interpreter: it is required to generate PDF files. I highly recommend downloading and installing latest version. It also wouldn’t hurt to install a raster image processing program in advance. Of the open and free ones, GIMP or Paint.NET are good options for this.

When everything is ready, feel free to launch Scribus and, in order not to reinvent the wheel, ask for help and ideas from ready-made examples or templates. To begin with, you can, for example, use one of the templates in the “File Create from Template” menu. As a punching bag for my training, I chose a blank for a small A4 newspaper (Newsletter_2).

Well, you have to take action - but what to do?

Keep in mind that the templates included with the program are, unfortunately, not yet Russified. Therefore, you will have to tinker a lot with styles to make any template usable. Use the “Edit Paragraph Styles” menu item, select a style and click the “Edit” button. You can select any Russian font suitable for a given style and configure its parameters, and then repeat this operation for all other styles.

Unfortunately, only after the operation described above (at least in Scribus for Windows) will you be able to use Russian in all text fields of the template. Don't forget to save the modified template.

In the future, when working with a publication, your best assistants will be the context menu, called by right-clicking on an object, and the “Properties” panel, called through the same context menu or by pressing a key. For example, if in the Newsletter_2 template you want to insert a picture in the space provided for it, you need to call the context menu for this empty frame and select “Insert Image”. To fit your picture into the frame, you can change its scale in the Image area of the Properties panel. But there is another way...

Baba - flowers, children - ice cream!

Scribus gives you exactly the tools you need. Whether you need to fit an image into a frame or, conversely, adjust the frame to the selected scale - Scribus has tools for both. The main thing is not to confuse flowers with ice cream, and to be able to distinguish a text frame from a graphic one!

If you have decided on the scale of the image and now want to fit the frame to it, then disable the “Size locked” attribute for this frame in the context menu, and then select “Block to image size” in the same place. By the way, I didn't find anything similar in QuarkXPress!

Function context menu"Edit Text" (+Y) looks very useful for text frames. It calls up a dialogue with the difficult-to-translate title Story Editor. This "Narrative Editor" allows you to change the content and design of text elements with the comfort of a word processor.

Story Editor will give you the opportunity to fully concentrate on the content of the publication and the design of text elements. In the left part of the window, you can select a style for each paragraph or call the style editor.

Once you learn how to move frames, change styles and edit text, you can consider Scribus conquered. It creates truly complex, structured texts and typesets graphics-rich masterpieces. The program website has special section, which lists publications successfully typed in this program. Among them are rigorous scientific journals and graphic-rich publications about anime.

With a slight movement of the hand, the trousers turn...

Scribus offers incredible customization flexibility. The appearance of the program “with a slight movement of the hand” can be transformed beyond recognition by choosing one of seven design styles. From functionality color management system, import and export, hyphenation, fonts, PostScript and PDF “validator” (pre-launch check), “hot” keys, external tools, list of short words and extensions can be customized. By the way, if you lack Scribus functionality, then look at the list of available extensions on the developers’ website - maybe it already has what you need.

To give an idea of the program's expansion capabilities, the developers included in the distribution a wizard that generates a calendar template. If you want to quickly make a beautiful calendar, then select the “Scripts Scripts Scribus Calendar Wizard” menu. For some reason, in order to select Russian in the dialog box that opens, you must first click. Then turn on the Whole Year option to create a calendar for the whole year and turn off Draw Image Frame (we’ll somehow create the drawing ourselves). After clicking OK, dialogs follow for selecting the size of the sheet of paper, then the font, after which the calendar itself is generated.

Making a calendar using the Scribus Calendar Wizard script is easier than brewing instant coffee - after generating the calendar, you just need to insert pictures, humming the melody from the advertisement “Just add water!”

You have an open fracture here, not a closed one.

With all its many professional features and a ton of innovation, Scribus is certainly not without its drawbacks. The publishing system is currently experiencing a kind of growing pains. A huge number of codes interacting with each other are poorly optimized. The speed and reliability of the latest stable release of Scribus 1.3.3.9 still leaves much to be desired. Many features do not work as the end user expects.

But despite all this, Scribus should not be considered hopelessly ill software product. Existing shortcomings should be considered only as temporary inconvenience. The upcoming next version of Scribus is actually redesigned and re-tailored. The developers claim that this will increase the speed of the program and its reliability. Scribus is indeed developing rapidly, and its new versions will continue to amaze with their capabilities.

I begin to act without noise and dust according to the newly approved plan!

At first glance, it may seem incredible that Scribus is a viable alternative to many commercial layout and design programs. But this is true. Scribus users already have at their disposal powerful system color management (including support for the CMYK model), extended support raster graphics, layer management, SVG format support, use of plug-ins, scripts and even barcode generation.

In general, Scribus has everything you need to prepare a modern illustrated publication, and, in my opinion, in the near future Scribus will easily grab a piece of the pie owned by such monsters as QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign. After all, just recently Linux quietly adopted part of the desktop operating system market!

Citizens, keep your money in a savings bank!

By default, Scribus calls GIMP as an external program for editing images, but at the same time naively believes that the path to it is specified in the corresponding system PATH variable. The GIMP installer for Windows does not have the habit of adding the path to itself in this variable, so to ensure that the graphics program is called without problems, go to the menu item "File Scribus Settings...", select the "External Tools" tab and in the "Graphics Tool" area write the full path to your favorite graphic editor, for example C:/GIMP-2.0/bin/gimp-2.2.exe or C:/glasgow. 0.2/cinepaint. exe. In this case, the startup line should not contain spaces, so if the application being called is located in the C: Program Files folder, then it will have to be moved or copied to another location.

Scribus

Open and free program for layout and design.

Grade: 5/5
System requirements: Celeron 1000 MHz processor, 64 MB RAM.
Supported OS: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP,Linux, Unix, Mac OS X.
Distribution size: 18 MB.
Developer: http://www.scribus.net

Ghostscript

PS/PDF interpreter (extends Scribus capabilities).

Grade: 4,5/5
System requirements:
Supported OS:
Distribution size: 11.6 MB.
Developer: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

GSview

PS/PDF viewer (requires Ghostscript to work).

Grade: 4/5
System requirements: Pentium processor II, 200 MHz, 32 MB RAM.
Supported OS: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X.
Distribution size: 1.42 MB.
Developer:

And magazines. But professionals prefer well-known products that are the most powerful on the market. What programs are these? Adobe InDesign and Quark Xpress. About them and we'll talk Further.

Quark Xpress newspaper and magazine layout program

This development is the perfect tool necessary for preparing publications for any media projects. It is used by millions of people all over the world. These include designers from small companies and layout designers who work in major publishing houses. They all speak highly of the program's many functions and capabilities.

The latest version has received an excellent innovation - the ability to work with tablets and other popular mobile devices from a variety of manufacturers. This feature has turned the program into the only multi-platform layout tool in the publishing industry.

Key Features

U new version This layout program has the following features:

Conditional styles support. These are styles with the help of which certain pieces of text are designed based on the rules set by the layout designer. And all this happens in automatic mode. Thus, you can get a finished layout in a couple of minutes.
Setting automatically changing numbering when adding or deleting items. Layouts can be imported into Word without losing bullets or numbering.
Using callouts. This function makes it possible to bind any element or group to a page or a specific place in the text. If previously it was necessary to manually make any changes with notes and quotations, now this is possible using automatic settings.
Ability to select font and size, set line breaks in an additional window. All changes made will be saved in the original layout.

Adobe InDesign program

The fame of this layout program extends throughout the world. After all, the developer on the market is simply a giant. This is the best program of its kind. It has built-in support for the Russian language, unlike Quark. This is a universal application. It provides the most precise control over typography and design. With it, you can create expressive layouts for a variety of screens. When adapting to different formats high quality the image is saved.

List of program features

There are a lot of them:

A feature called Fluid Layout allows you to easily design and create layout versions for different devices, as well as printed materials. Moreover, all this is done in one file.
Content can be linked even if it is contained in multiple documents. This makes it possible to apply changes to the parent text or object to all child elements associated with it.
Text can be extracted from an existing layout using special content collection tools.
The ability to add interactive HTML content to layouts is a very interesting feature of InDesign magazine layout software.
Projects can be composed while retaining features such as overlays.
Support for integration with other company products. You can easily sell a wide variety of products.
Improved features for exporting PDF documents.

As can be seen from the review, despite the possibility of choice, layout programs are in different weight categories. Most choose a product from Adobe. But there is no need to discount Quark, since the program becomes more convenient with each update. Although other analogues are striving to take their place in the market, it is still difficult for them to reach the giants.

For what purposes are programs needed?

Before using programs for website layout, you need to divide them into several categories.

Working with graphics. First of all, the layout designer must be able to work with the layout he receives. If he cannot cut out the necessary parts from the layout, then further layout is impossible in principle.

Working with code. Once you have figured out the graphics and cut out everything you need, you will need to start the main work of a layout designer - writing code. To make this as fast and convenient as possible, you need to use the appropriate software.

Checking the work. When you have already done the main work, you will need to check its result. As a rule, you can make a lot of mistakes during the writing process, especially if you do not have much experience. Also, different requirements are usually placed on the finished layout. Checks will help to adjust it to these requirements.

To work with the layout

The layout designer needs to remember the need to work with the layout. There is PhotoShop for this, although you can use GIMP as a free alternative. Both are suitable, although Photoshop is, of course, a little more convenient.

You need to understand that a layout can contain hundreds of layers. To work with it without brakes, you need to work on less powerful hardware. Much depends on the layout itself. The fewer layers and elements, the smaller the file size, the faster it will be processed.

The actual layout

Everything is very clear with the layout, but what software can be useful for layout? Maybe you need a program for website layout using only html and css. In this case, you can choose something simpler. The more complex the work, the more functional the solution is worth using.

Notebook. The simplest thing you can have for editing code. No functionality. In what cases will you have to use it? Let's say you need to show a friend some piece of code, but there is no suitable program on his computer. Notepad is not suitable for editing, much less writing code.

Rice. 1. Notepad does not have syntax highlighting, so it is not suitable for working with code.

Notepad++. But this is a much more advanced tool. It is often called the programmer's notebook. It supports syntax highlighting, multiple languages and encodings. Writing code is easy, convenient, it is possible to connect plugins and work with a large number of files at the same time. Depending on your knowledge of languages, you can enable or disable tooltips. Experienced coders usually turn them off because they only interfere with writing code.

Rice. 2. Notepad++ has excellent syntax highlighting. Tags, attributes, attribute values, and plain text are highlighted differently.

Adobe DreamViewer. A more powerful program that includes not only an editor, but also tools for completely visual creation of pages and elements. You will have to learn how to work with it, since it is quite complex. It must be said that any visual editor inserts a lot of unnecessary code.

This is also true in the case of Dreamviewer, but here you have to pay for speed. The program is suitable for professionals when they need to quickly get code pages to show it to the customer.

SublimeText. Very similar to Notepad++. It differs mainly only in the interface and various plugins that can be connected.

Front Page. Another program from Microsoft. It also allows you to work with images, videos and JavaScript.

Again, the choice depends on whether you need a visual component or if you intend to write more code yourself.

Statistics show that most developers use Sublime and Notepad++. These are the best programs for website layout. But they are suitable for you if you already know the code and don't really need help. Then these editors will give you more freedom.

You can also select UltraEdit. Although the program is not very popular, it opens large files fairly quickly and is also convenient to write code in.

Many people also praise NetBeans. This development environment is well suited for writing web scripts and scripts. Recommended for beginner programmers.

Among more modern software we can note text editor Vim. In terms of functionality, it is considered one of the most powerful. For example, you can work with many files in one window, compare two files, and then quickly make edits. Another feature is the unlimited ability to cancel and redo some of your actions.

Checking the layout

As a rule, normal code editors already contain tools for checking what has been written. For example, code highlighting makes it easy to identify occasional typos and minor errors (unclosed tag, extra semicolon, etc.)

But checking the layout is not only about this. For more complete testing, you need to use other programs. For example, the same debugger. I have already mentioned it several times. Firstly, it is an opportunity to quickly find a problem and solve it. Because you can disable any styles in the debugger, it's a quick way to check if your media rules are working if you're also implementing responsiveness.

This may also not be enough. If the template should look the same in most popular browsers, you need to check the layout for cross-browser compatibility. There are several online services for this. One of the most popular is crossbrowsertesting.com/. Certain functions on the site are only available for money. The service has gained popularity due to the ability to check the site in more than a hundred versions of different browsers.

Rice. 3. Crossbrowsertesting is one of the resources that offers cross-browser testing in hundreds of browser versions.

It may still be necessary to adapt the layout for older versions of browsers. As you know, the most problems have always arisen with Internet Explorer. I previously wrote about IE Tester, a program where you can check for free how a site will look in older versions of this browser. NetRederender is also suitable for this. She lets you look appearance site in IE versions from 5.5 to 9.

Conclusion

Layout of a website may require quite a lot of services and programs. The minimum configuration includes a program for working with graphics, 1 code editor and 2-3 services for checking layout. I've seen people who have a much larger set of tools. It all depends on the complexity of your activity as a web developer. That's all for today. Subscribe to our blog if you want to know everything about website building.

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