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.