Any suggestions for a good app for creating a simple 2-page newsletter on a Mac Color Classic II?

[Cory5412]

but I think they have a bit of an attitude problem that holds them back.

A couple years ago I posted a throw-away joke about the "for OS9" (aka XPress Edition) PowerMac G4 on my twitter and the Xpress people replied back in some sassy manner, combatatively, as if they thought that would win them a sale.

Affinity Publisher has begun to exist since then and if I needed to do some kind of print layout design I'd turn there before Quark. (Though, I'd probably start with MS Publisher, it's honestly Not Bad, but it depends on what you need.)

I don't think Word or Pages could handle bleeds and probably not crop marks either.  Or Pantone color support.

for... invoices? I'm extremely curious as to what you're doing. Most invoices, even ones that have been dressed up, are as far as I've ever seen, fairly simple documents. Are you using a press to print invoices?

Microsoft Publisher or Affinity Publisher?  I remember on the Affinity forums, some people advised them to use a different name because of the bad impression Microsoft Publisher left on so many people.  Obviously, they didn't listen.

Microsoft Publisher, in this case. It's a fine program. To be honest, the long-standing impression I always got from Macworld et al was that Adobe PageMaker was roughly at the same level, in terms of technical capability, that Microsoft Publisher was. It's typically pretty easy to teach regular Office users how to use, since all the tools are set up the same way they are in the rest of Office, and most people's layout needs basically amount to posters and newsletters run off from the office laserjet or bizhub.

 

[dcr]

A couple years ago I posted a throw-away joke about the "for OS9" (aka XPress Edition) PowerMac G4 on my twitter and the Xpress people replied back in some sassy manner, combatatively, as if they thought that would win them a sale.

The way they respond to people, even paying customers on their own forums, leads one to believe they are living under the delusion that they still have 95% market share.

for... invoices? I'm extremely curious as to what you're doing. Most invoices, even ones that have been dressed up, are as far as I've ever seen, fairly simple documents. Are you using a press to print invoices?

No bleeds or color on the invoices.  But I've had bleeds and Pantone color matching on other items I've used data and mail merge for.

The invoices are printed on a digital press.  We used to print the invoices themselves, without data, in color and then run them through a laser printer or inkjet printer to imprint them as needed.  But, with digital presses, we can just print it all at once and not have to worry about storing pre-printed invoices anymore.  The invoices I use for my company are probably overkill but I hope they stand out among other invoices clients may receive.

Microsoft Publisher, in this case. It's a fine program. To be honest, the long-standing impression I always got from Macworld et al was that Adobe PageMaker was roughly at the same level, in terms of technical capability, that Microsoft Publisher was. It's typically pretty easy to teach regular Office users how to use, since all the tools are set up the same way they are in the rest of Office, and most people's layout needs basically amount to posters and newsletters run off from the office laserjet or bizhub.

It was good for printing on their own printers but not so good when taking it to a printer to have them printed.  We would always cringe whenever anyone said they had their newsletter or other job to be printed as a Microsoft Publisher file, especially if it used colors other than black.  Color separations were never a strong point.  I don't think it was ever really on par with PageMaker insofar as being used in a commercial printing environment.  Even with a copy of Publisher on our own machines, it was difficult to work with a customer file.

Things got better when PDF support got better because then we could just tell people to send us a PDF.

 

[johnklos]

QuarkXpress, in spite of the company that made it, was a wonderful program back in the day. I own a license of 3.32. It's faster to load and to do literally anything else than Word, even Word 5. Even Xpress version 4 was pretty decent, and there wasn't anything I couldn't make with it.

Aldus was good until they sold to Adobe. Adobe had, and still has, a horrible habit of never finishing a product. You can't just take a version of their software and use it - there's always something broken, something not quite right, something for you to always keep hoping that a new version might fix. And while a new version might improve or fix something, there's always something else that's broken in its place.

I still wish it were easy to run Xpress 3.32 on a modern computer. It's much faster than even the simplest of word processors, even (or particularly) on an original m68000.

 

[CC_333]

I still wish it were easy to run Xpress 3.32 on a modern computer.

Maybe in time, emulation will be more perfected and allow it to run?

I mean, it's already pretty good, and allows *most* software to run, but there are definitely lots of bugs yet to work out (and lots of hardware that isn't being emulated per se, but rather is replaced with fake hardware that overrides much of the original Mac ROM; this often prevents software that relies on direct access to the hardware (most disk partitioning software come to mind) from running properly. Is Quark xPress 3.32 such a program?).

c

 

[johnklos]

No. QuarkXpress runs fine in any environment. The issue is more one of how to easily integrate it with other workflows. I suppose if I had a little more reason to use it, I'd probably figure out some way to network things better.

Basilisk II works wonderfully, for example, but I don't know of any way to bridge a Mac virtual machine with native ethernet. If I could do that, then it'd be much easier to do all sorts of things... One of these days I'll have to look in to this again.

 

[Cory5412]

There are supposed to be newer emulators that do that. There's also PowerPC emulators, most of which have implemented Ethernet from the outset. (home networking wasn't really common when BII got going).

 

[dcr]

Aldus was good until they sold to Adobe.

Better way to say it might be that "[INSERT NAME HERE] was good until they sold to Adobe."