home › BY › Programs for the layout of the magazine to choose 8. The best programs for the layout of magazines and newspapers. Comparison of the program for layout layout Scribus with a paid analogue of Adobe InDesign

Programs for the layout of the magazine to choose 8. The best programs for the layout of magazines and newspapers. Comparison of the program for layout layout Scribus with a paid analogue of Adobe InDesign

Layout programs

There are several computer programs intended for electronic layout. Which one to choose in a particular case, the publisher and (or) the layout designer decide 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 for creating multi-page layouts. Among them are Adobe products (PageMaker, Frame Maker, InDesign), as well as QuarkXPress, Corel Ventura Publisher, TeX. All of them have their own characteristics and can be optimal in different cases.

If the source text has a heterogeneous structure, formulas, tables and other complicating elements are often found in it, then it is better to typeset it 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, InDesign programs are suitable for its layout. They are successfully used in book, newspaper, magazine and advertising layout.

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

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

Basically, text Microsoft program Word can be used for layout. It is worth installing the necessary add-ons, and many functions of special software products - PageMaker, XPress or InDesign - will become available in Word. Some publications are systematically typed 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. And in the end, the main thing is how the reader perceives the book, and one must focus primarily on readability, no matter what program is used.

Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign is one of the largest software products of 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 to the functions of Adobe PageMaker. First of all, the program is intended for designers and layout designers - both those working in professional studios and single creative people. WITH help from Adobe InDesign can lay out any periodical or book edition.

In addition to printing, it allows you to export finished documents to the current PDF format and to other formats, while maintaining all the variety of design and unique design solutions. InDesign was the first of its kind to bring so many publishing functions together. 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 arsenal of "InDesign" - the most advanced transparency functions and visual special effects, layout styles 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 intended for tablets; article palette to manage the document without changing the layout; the ability to add to electronic documents audio 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 design and typography. Create stylish, expressive pages for print, tablets, 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 different screen and page sizes using the Fluid Layout feature for .folio files. Use the Alternate Layout feature for better control over your workflow. Increase your productivity with the following features: related content, content collection tools, a list of recently used fonts, grayscale viewing, and more.

"Liquid" layout

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

QuarkXpress

I'm not particularly familiar with the history of this company, but the program is not bad. Until now, newspapers and magazines use the 4th version (now there is already a 8th version), because of the simplicity. Support for Russian is NOT built-in and must be installed separately, and each version has its own. Without additional settings, word wrap will not work,

and at magazine and newspaper layout nothing will work without word hyphenation, so if you are going to make up 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 Design

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

In order for all these programs to install and work well, you need to clean up the fonts. For this, some one is installed (the most famous is Adobe Font Manager). " Broken fonts” come across quite often, Arial often turns out to be a broken font (one of the main ones in Windows). That is, of course, this is not visible to the eyes - the font itself and the font work fine in Word, for example, but some characters are incorrectly “drawn” 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 create any layouts for printing: flyers, posters, brochures, booklets) This text processing software but not with a photo, or for arranging text and photos. These programs do not have photo editing tools, so at least one other must-have program is Adobe Photoshop, which prepares all the bitmap graphics for your publication.

We can say that it is slightly behind its vector brothers Inkscape and Scribus, which already today allow you to work with color at a professional level. I will talk about a real 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 himself came!

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

The main idea behind Scribus is to use technological processes and standards developed by Adobe. Of course we are talking about PostScript and PDF. Moreover, it is the latter that is used in the work and when saving the file. Therefore, whatever one may say, but Adobe unwittingly initiated the emergence of a wonderful open program for layout and design. Unable to resist the temptation, Scribus changed open formats(like SVG) in favor of the industry standard. There is no excuse for him, indeed, he himself came!

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 has received support among programmers, and Scribus has gained well-deserved popularity among Linux users. Then the program was ported to Windows, Mac OS X and some other systems. Now a well-established simultaneous release of new versions of this program for three leading operating systems(Windows, Linux and Mac OS X) is the pride of the development team.

Strike iron without leaving the cash register!

To ensure the "iron" reliability and portability of your documents, I recommend, without wasting time, to install Ghostscript - an open and free PostScript and PDF interpreter.

Scribus' import and export features take full advantage of the Ghostscript interpreter. Exporting to PDF is just great: the pre-launch feature will help you catch any errors and ensure the files are generated. PDF versions 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5 excellent quality. At the same time, you will get a huge number of special features: encryption, creating input fields, and even presentational effects. But that's not all! The most curious feature of this program is that you can not only export the file to PDF, but also open it for editing! Did I not say that the program works in this format?

Calm down, let's all sit down!

Find mutual language with the program is not as difficult as it might seem at first glance, it is within the power of every sane user. The program interface is quite logical and completely Russified - the Russian language is indicated during the installation process. When you install Scribus, it will ask you if you have the Ghostscript interpreter, which is required to generate PDF files. I highly recommend downloading and installing latest version. It also does not hurt to install a program for processing raster images in advance. Of the open and free ones, GIMP or Paint.NET are well suited for this.

When you're done, feel free to fire up Scribus and, rather than reinvent the wheel, ask for help and ideas from ready-made examples or templates. For starters, you can, say, use one of the templates in the "File New 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 in the delivery of the program, unfortunately, are not Russified yet. 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 choose any Russian font suitable for this style and adjust 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 the Russian language in all template text fields. Don't forget to save the modified template.

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

Grandma - flowers, children - ice cream!

Scribus will give you exactly the tools you want. Whether you need to fit the image into a frame or, conversely, fit the frame to the selected scale - Scribus has tools for both. The main thing is not to confuse flowers with ice cream, and 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 turn off the "Size Locked" attribute for this frame in the context menu, and then select the "Block to Image Sizes" item 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 brings up a dialogue with the difficult-to-translate name Story Editor. This "Narrative Editor" allows you to change the content and design of text elements with the comfort of a word processor.

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

Once you get the hang of moving frames, changing styles, and editing text, you'll be good to go with Scribus. It creates really complex, structured texts and typeset masterpieces rich in graphics. The program website has special section, which lists publications that are successfully typesetted in this program. Among them are rigorous scientific journals and graphics-rich publications about anime.

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

Scribus offers amazing 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 configurable color management system, import and export, hyphenation, fonts, PostScript and PDF validator (pre-launch check), hotkeys, external tools, list of short words and extensions. By the way, if you are missing the functionality of Scribus, then look at the list of available extensions on the developer's website - in case they already have what you need.

To give an idea of the possibilities of expanding the program, the developers included in the distribution kit a wizard that generates a calendar template. If you want to quickly make a beautiful calendar, then select the menu "Scripts Scripts Scribus Calendar Wizard". For some reason, in order to select the Russian language 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 put the drawing ourselves somehow). After clicking on OK, dialogs for choosing the size of a sheet of paper, then the font follow, after which the calendar itself is generated.

Making a calendar with the Scribus Calendar Wizard script is easier than making instant coffee - once the calendar is generated, all you have to do is insert pictures while singing the tune from the "Just Add Water!" ad.

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

With all the many professional features and tons of innovations, Scribus is certainly not without flaws. The publishing system is currently experiencing a kind of growing pains. A huge number of interacting codes are poorly optimized. The speed and reliability of the latest stable release of Scribus 1.3.3.9 leaves much to be desired. Many features do not work as expected by the end user.

But, despite all this, you should not consider Scribus hopelessly ill. software product. The existing shortcomings should be considered only as a temporary inconvenience. The next version of Scribus, which is about to be released, is actually redesigned and re-tailored. The developers claim that this will increase the speed of the program and its reliability. Scribus is indeed evolving at a rapid pace, and its new versions will continue to amaze with their abilities.

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 real alternative to many commercial layout and design programs. But this is true. Scribus users already have powerful system color management (including support for the CMYK model), extended support raster graphics, layer management, SVG support, plug-ins, scripts, and even barcode generation.

All in all, Scribus has everything you need to prepare a modern illustrated edition, and in my opinion, in the near future Scribus will easily chop off a piece of the pie that belongs to such monsters as QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign. Indeed, quite recently, Linux has adapted part of the desktop operating system market without noise and dust!

Citizens, keep money in the savings bank!

By default, Scribus calls GIMP as an external image editing program, but naively assumes that the path to it is specified in the corresponding system PATH variable. The GIMP installer for Windows is not in the habit of adding the path to itself in this variable, so in order for the graphics program to be called without problems, go to the "File Scribus Settings..." menu item, select the "External Tools" tab and in the "Graphics Tool" area write the full path to your favorite graphics editor, such as C:/GIMP-2.0/bin/gimp-2.2.exe or C:/glasgow. 0.2/cinepaint. exe. In this case, the launch line should not contain spaces, so if the called application 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 the capabilities of Scribus).

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 are these programs? Adobe InDesign and Quark Xpress. about them and will be discussed Further.

Newspaper and magazine layout program Quark Xpress

This development is the perfect tool for preparing publications of any media projects. It is used by millions of people around the world. These are designers of small companies, and layout designers who work in major publishing houses. All of them praise the many functions and features of the program.

The latest version received a great 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

At new version This layout program has the following features:

Support for conditional styles. These are styles with the help of which certain pieces of text are drawn up based on the rules set by the layout designer. And all this happens in automatic mode. Thus, you can get a ready-made layout in a couple of minutes.
Set automatically changing numbering when adding or deleting items. Layouts can be imported into Word without losing bullets and numbering.
Using callouts. This function makes it possible to link any element or group to a page or a specific place in the text. If earlier it was necessary to manually make any changes with notes and quotes, now this is possible with the help of automatic settings.
Possibility to choose font and size, set line break in additional window. All changes made will be saved in the original layout.

Adobe InDesign

The popularity of this layout program extends all over the world. After all, the developer on the market is just 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 images are saved.

List of program features

There are a lot of them:

A feature called Fluid Layout makes it easy to 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 or object text 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 the 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 you can see from the review, despite the possibility of choice, layout programs are in different weight categories. Most of them choose a product from Adobe. But Quark does not need to be discounted, as the program becomes more and 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.

What are the purposes of the programs?

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

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

Working with code. When you figure out the graphics and cut out everything you need, you will need to start the main work of the layout designer - writing code. To make it as fast and convenient as possible, you need to use the right software.

Checking work. When you have already done the main work, you will need to check its result. As a rule, in the process of writing, you can make many mistakes, especially if you do not have much experience. Also, different requirements are usually imposed 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, of course, is a little more convenient.

You need to understand that the layout can contain hundreds of layers. To work with it without brakes, you need to work on more or 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.

Actually layout

With the layout, everything is very clear, but what software can be useful for layout? Maybe you need a program for website layout only in html and css. In this case, you can choose something simpler. Whose work is more difficult, the more functional solution should be used.

Notebook. The simplest thing you can have for code editing. No functionality. In what cases will you need to use it? Let's say you need to show a friend a piece of code, but there is no suitable program on his computer. Notepad is not suitable for editing, let alone 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 referred to as a programmer's notebook. It supports syntax highlighting, many 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 hints. Experienced typesetters usually turn them off because they only get in the way of 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. Work with it will have to be studied, since it is quite complicated. It must be said that any visual editor inserts a lot of redundant code.

This is true in the case of Dreamviewer, but here you have to pay for speed. The program is suitable for professionals when you need to quickly get the page code 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 layout of sites. But they will suit 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 quickly enough and it is also convenient to write code in it.

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

Of the more modern software, it can be noted 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 changes. Another feature is the unlimited ability to undo and redo some of your actions.

Layout check

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

But the layout check is not only about that. 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. Since you can turn off any styles in the debugger, this allows you to quickly find it, you can use it to check the operation of media rules if you also implement adaptability.

This may not be enough either. 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 features on the site are available only for money. The service 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 crossbrowser testing in hundreds of browser versions.

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

Conclusion

A lot of services and programs may be required for website layout. In the minimum configuration, this is a program for working with graphics, 1 code editor and 2-3 services for checking the layout. I have seen people who have a much larger toolbox. 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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