Mickozzy said:
Well I know this may seem silly but I am creating my first magazine. I
understand many programs and am quite fluent with adobe. I was
wondering what more experienced individuals would choose to create the
layout. I was thinking about using illustrator but am curious if there
would be a better choice. I already have illustrator, pagemaker,
publisher, and correll but can get other programs.
Adobe Illustrator would be a very poor choice, because it can only do
one page at a time. Yes, you can create a bunch of 'pages' on the
pasteboard, or use different layers for the content of each 'page', but
you certainly won't make any friends at the pre-press shop that has to
output your files that way ...
PageMaker is obsolete now, but still fairly well supported in the
industry; even if your service bureau or printer doesn't have it any
more you can always create a PDF from your document using Distiller,
which comes with it -- most places can deal with those *if the files are
set up properly for prepress*. PM can be a little unreliable but, in
principle at least, is capable of doing everything you need to produce
professional documents.
I wouldn't recommend Publisher very highly; it's more geared towards
'newsletters' than 'magazines'. But if you don't get a lot of ads from
outside sources and can find a printer to work with your files it's a
reasonable possibility.
CorelDraw is probably the second-best of the four you've mentioned;
while it often has problems printing things properly, and has rather
weak typographic features, at least it supports multiple pages, linking
text containers and so on. Moreover many printers have experience
outputting from it -- or converting to a format that works better, as it
has plenty of export options.
If you're already familiar with Adobe products, I'd recommend InDesign.
You may even be able to acquire it as an 'upgrade' using your PageMaker
licence. It's sort of a cross between PM, QuarkXPress (its principal
competition) and AI. If you own Adobe Photoshop you can get the whole
"Creative Suite" at an upgrade price; ID, P'shop, and AI work very well
together, and ID is a pretty solid platform for printing or producing
PDFs incorporating elements from the other two. It does excellent
typography, including full support for modern fonts with extended or
multilingual character sets, and it makes it much easier to create
special effects like soft shadows and translucent objects than most
other programs do. It also handles placed PDFs well, an important
consideration if your advertisers will be submitting artwork in that
format, as has become very common in the industry.
Finally, I advise you to talk to your (prospective?) printers about what
formats they prefer or can support, and any particular requirements of
their workflow.
