Aldus Pagemaker vs QuarkXpress for Compact Macs

[CompaqMac]

I know this was a heated war at the time, and QuarkXpress took the demanding lead by the mid 90s.

I'd like to know which would be the best to choose for a SE/30. Also, what about for a hard drive less 4MB Macintosh Plus/Macintosh SE?  Assume either a dual 800k or triple Super Drive setup.

 

[dcr]

I don't know about Quark, but I have PageMaker 2 and have run it on a Mac 512ke.  I haven't done any real work on it; it was mostly to see what version 2 was like since I started with version 4.

I did, however, run PageMaker 4.2 (and later PageMaker 5) on a Macintosh PowerBook 180c which has a 68030 processor as does the SE/30.  I did do lots of work on it.  Screen size was sometimes an issue but not a deal-breaker.  You just had to scroll more to work on certain areas of the page.  But it was definitely usable and fast enough for the time.  The PowerBook did have 14 MB of RAM though.  I don't remember the minimum requirements for PM4 or PM5.  And I'm not sure how either of those versions would work without a hard drive or if they would even fit on an 800k floppy.

We occasionally had customers give us Quark files, but we had a converter that turned them into PageMaker documents so never really used Quark back then except for a demo version.

 

[johnklos]

QuarkXpress 3.32 ran faster on an m68000 Mac Classic than does Word 5.1. I used it as a word processor for ages, and I'd still use it if modern versions were as good as 3.32 or 4.

 

[ArmorAlley]

I know this was a heated war at the time, and QuarkXpress took the demanding lead by the mid 90s.

I'd like to know which would be the best to choose for a SE/30. Also, what about for a hard drive less 4MB Macintosh Plus/Macintosh SE?  Assume either a dual 800k or triple Super Drive setup.

When I started college in 1989, I met postgrads who used PageMaker 3.5 to type up and layout their theses. The machines available at the time were Pluses and SEs with 1MB RAM.

That being said, some years later when I was a pagesetter for the Student newspaper, we had Quark Xpress 3.32 on a IIsi with 5MB RAM (and System 6, I think). It also had a 19" two-page display. Awesome.

Although I personally prefer Quark XPress (but on a more powerful 68K machine), Pagemaker v2-v4 might be better choices for compact Macs.

For the Plus/SE, you should run System 6 and set up a RAM disk for the system files. You have 4MB RAM. Make good use of it. Keep it as small as possible (so, a few hundred KB): boot from a floppy with RAM disk activated. Copy the necessary files across to the RAM disk and reboot with the RAM as the system disk. Then run PageMaker from the floppies.

 

[CompaqMac]

Thanks for all this excellent information.  I definitely have some versions narrowed down now that I can potentially check out.  Playing around with both will be part of the fun.

Also thanks for the usage tips about RAM disks.

My kind of mid term goal is to get a 3x SuperDrive SE with 4 MB of RAM and get all the best software for paint, page layout, animation etc.

 

[superjer2000]

I used to run Quark on my Mac Classic to produce a newsletter and it worked well.  I never got used to PageMaker's interface. 

 

[Scott Baret]

Truthfully, it's like Coke and Pepsi. If you can, try both and see which you prefer. Make sure you find versions that can run on your Mac though.