Your Collection Is Complete With These Aug 10 '01    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Software Microsoft Office 2010 Home & Student (3 From $89 Microsoft Windows 7 Professional From $88 The Bottom Line These are the five best desktop publishing programs on the market today. Being a graphic artist, I have seen just about every desktop publishing program that is on the market. Most of them are installed on my computer at work as well as home. I have come to appreciate most of them and learn the ropes about them with training and self-training. The five desktop publishing programs that have my vote are: Quark Xpress, Pagemaker, Corel Draw, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Notice, that I did not mention Microsoft Publisher 98, I do not consider it part of my five favorite desktop publishing programs as most of my customers do. Microsoft Publisher makes is very difficult to color separate artwork, especially when one of my customers has inserted a piece of clipart. At my work, we generally run two or three colors we do not specialize in four color process. Quark Xpress is one of my five favorite because I use it every day for my page layouts. Whether it be a simple envelope or a complex newsletter, postcard, letterhead or whatever, this is the number one program that I choose for page layout. The screen frequencies are easily controlled in this program when it comes to outputting them to my laser printer. Once graphics are imported correctly in Quark Xpress, they can be color separated for printing purposes. Quark Xpress will cost you around $400 to purchase, but it is well worth the investment. Pagemaker is another one of my choices. Before I became familiar with Quark Xpress, this was my number one desktop publishing choice. I have chosen this as part of my list because I consider it the easiest when it comes to making booklets that require signatures to be set up. The plug-in that is included in Pagemaker simplifies creating signatures for booklets. Pagemaker is made by Adobe and will also cost you around $400. Corel Draw is used when it comes to creating logos that require pantone colors. I can easily create them and then export them to import into programs such as: Quark Xpress and Pagemaker for color separations. Corel Draw also makes it easy for me to create logos and such for sending to an outside vendor when I create all my text to outlines and save my file as an eps or tiff file. The Corel Draw package also comes with Corel Trace which is great for the start of making a vector logo and Corel PhotoPaint which is similar to Photoshop where you can scan photos in and manipulate them or make nifty wallpaper for your desktop. I have seen Corel Draw for around $200. Illustrator plays a similiar role as Corel Draw. I don't normally like using Illustrator, but when I run into a problem with Corel Draw, I migrate my mouse over to Illustrator to see if it can handle the job that I could not do in Corel Draw. You can create outlines in Illustrator just like you can do in Corel Draw. In Illustrator you can select one of the premade shapes and use the different filters to manipulate the graphic. You can pick up Illustrator for about $200-$300. I use Photoshop for scanning in photos and manipulating them. Most of the time, I turn the photo into grayscale, unless it will need some extra creation on my part. Photoshop is a very powerful program, which is very cool to make desktop wallpaper for your computer with the filters that are included with the program and the free ones you can download online. Adobe Photoshop will cost around $400. Each desktop publishing program that I have chosen has their own special features, none of them are inexpensive, but are well worth the investment. I can not be without any one of them or I would be lost at my job.

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