[doesnt_know]

What is an example of a "high-end page-layout program" referenced in that document? I mean, of course I assume they exist for professional type setting, book publishing and such, but I have never seen or heard of the actual software.

[syradar]

We used Adobe InDesign at my last work, which I believe is an industry standard. Affinity Layout if you don’t want to sell your kidney to Adobe. Scribus is an open source project but I’m not sure how the quality is in that.

[gdwatson]

> Scribus is an open source project but I’m not sure how the quality is in that.

I am not a typographer, and I’ve never used it in a professional capacity, but v1.6 (early 2024) improved Scribus a lot. I’ve used it and liked it for some personal projects for years, but the improved typography in 1.6 is big.

[lwhsiao]

LaTeX or Typst are also good examples.

[omnimus]

There is only Adobe InDesign. Even though you can make high quality layouts in other programs (Affinity, Scribus) once you get to actually printing in pro printer the whole pipeline is InDesign. It's Adobes secret money printer, software that many don't realize it rivals Photoshop in usage.

[lfauve]

No, the pro pipeline is PDF. You might argue that, if you are risk averse, you only trust Adobe’s tools to produce optimal PDF. This is of course Adobe’s moat. But Scribus’ export to pdf is excellent, in a pro setting

[omnimus]

Thats not what I am talking about. Your PDF might be identical but printers often require either their specific InDesign settings or straight up packaged InDesign project as source for printing (they used to require postscript lol).

I am not gonna argue if they are correct or not but the reality i've experienced is that at minimum socially the printing industry is married to InDesign.