Customer Reviews

Adobe Indesign CS3 Upgrade from Pagemaker [Old Version]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've been a long term PageMaker user and owned every version from 1.0 upwards to 7.0. So it was always going to be a hard thing to make the change to anything else. I bought InDesign mainly because I was getting problems with the more demanding DTP jobs that required separations, as well as feeling that more of what I created separately in Corel really ought to have been part of my main layout program. However, within a week of starting to use InDesign, I feel quite at home. There's enough carry-through to make life seem familiar, but loads of new intuitive functionality. It's early days, so I'm sure I'll find some limitations later, but they haven't appeared yet.

I have been a PageMaker user FOREVER beginning on my little Mac back in the 1980s (I am now on a Dell). I hated to give it up but when I lost the ability to save my PageMaker 7.0 files as pdf (thanks to installing and then removing a trial version of Adobe Professional 8) I had to switch. The company who prints my 40 page bi-monthly agriculture magazine said it was about time!

Yes, there are some similarities between PM and ID but there are so many "bells and whistles" in ID that I will definately need to be trained on this program. I converted my PM file with very little problem (a few font issues but fixable once I found instructions on Adobe's Web site) and do find a few things in ID nice to use (i.e., the gradiant feature). I guess my middle of the road rating is that the learning curve is a little higher than with PM. I also miss some things in PM that ID doesn't appear to do, but they're minor touches I had grown accustomed to over the years.

One warning...it is a memory hog for sure! It is slow to load (I have 1 GB of RAM running on a 1.86 GHz Pentium processor Dell laptop) and bogs the computer at times when running other programs with it (i.e., Photoshop).

I am optimistic, though, that I will come to enjoy ID almost as much as I loved PM (I even tried using QuarkExpress many, many times and always came back to PM)! Good luck!

I like this product because it makes sure-footed pdf conversions. My Pagemaker 7 would occasionally lock up the file when making conversions.
I also appreciate that In Design can open a previous Pagemaker file.

Since many printer no longer support PageMaker, the next choice for layout software is InDesign. It is nice to be able to purchase an upgrade rather than pay full price. The program loaded nicely and is more comprehensive than PageMaker.

I would love to review Adobe InDesign CS3, but I can't get the program to install on my new Vista system. Adobe technical support requested that I send them a conguration file, but its been almost a week and I haven't received a call back. Having used PageMaker for years, I look forward to using InDesign, but Adobe obviously needs to make some improvements.