Suggestions for Mac OS 8 DTP software

[Corgi]

I'm wanting to create a family genealogy book, and I have a pretty good idea of how I want the layout to look in my head but I'm not sure what the best software is to create it with. I'd really like to use the PowerBook 1400c for writing it, so I'm limiting the search to software compatible with OS 8.x. My 1400c is upgraded with a G3 and 60 MB RAM.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so at the end is a rough draft of the basic layout I'd like to achieve. I threw this together in Photoshop in a few minutes, so it's obviously not the best, but I think it's still helpful overall to have an idea of what I want to do.

A few features I would like include:

• The ability for the software to automatically update page numbers of linked sections. i.e. "Relationships" will link to a specific person, and if the page numbers change, there should be a command to update those page numbers without having to manually update the entire text.
• The ability to set a frame image around imported photo boxes. I can work around this in something like PhotoDeluxe or Kai's if I really have to, but I'd rather have the framing be a part of the layout system, as then I can (hopefully) change the frame on all photos at once. (This is not part of my example; the photo is just stuck in there.)
• The ability for text to flow around a photo box. I'm pretty sure any DTP software package can do that, but…
• Would be nice to either have good writing tools (spell check, hyphenation, etc) or the ability to import text from something like WordPerfect or Word if not.

I've heard good things, and bad things, regarding just about every package out there: QuarkXPress, FrameMaker, PageMaker, Canvas Pro, PageStream, etc. Apparently InDesign 1.5 will even run on my souped-up 1400, though I don't know how enjoyable that would be. I'm hoping there might be some folks out there with experience that might be able to guide me towards what package might be best.

Learning curve isn't too much of a concern for me. I've learned a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff over the years, so hopefully I can figure out the best tool for this job.

 

[ArmorAlley]

I used Quark XPress 3.x & Quark 4.x in the mid 1990s to lay out the Student Unions' newspaper in university and afterwards and I can highly recommend it. It takes a bit of a while to get used to it but it is worth the effort. Once you get used to it, you can layout pages quickly and to a high standard too.

 

[Phipli]

Adobe Pagemaker is another page layout option. The last version was 7, and it never made it to OSX. It was a flagging product by the end. Adobe replaced it with InDesign. My dad owned a copy so I used to use it for my homework as a kid sometimes, on my IIci (older versions than 7).