THE BEST DESKTOP PUBLISHING APPS FOR MAC
You needn’t spend a fortune to lay out pages and format documents better.
You needn’t spend a fortune to lay out pages and format documents better.
Page layout is a task we all attempt from time to time, yet desktop publishing software is a relatively neglected category. If you’ve never delved into Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress, you should see what you’re missing. And if you have used the high-end heavyweights but baulk at their prices – over $343 per year for InDesign, over $975 to buy QuarkXPress – we’ve got some much cheaper contenders.
The gold standard in this field is, of course, InDesign. QuarkXPress remains an equally strong choice, but it’s favoured more by large publishers and corporates than individual designers and studios. That’s at least partly because InDesign is part of Adobe’s broader Creative Cloud suite, which is unbeatable value if you need several of its apps.
Affinity Publisher, launched by Serif in the summer to complete its own smaller but more tightly integrated graphics suite, is available as a one-off purchase for less than a quarter of the annual price of InDesign alone. It’s by far the most credible budget option, but we also tried the even cheaper iStudio Publisher and Swift Publisher as well as comparing page layout in Apple’s free Pages.
Desktop publishing is primarily about print, whether to your laser or inkjet or preparing PDF files for commercial printing. InDesign and Pages can also be used to create both reflowable and fixed-layout ebooks; Pages comes with several illustrated ebook templates and can export directly to Apple Books, although Apple also offers iBooks Author, with more interactive features. iStudio Publisher can export a ‘text flow’ (story) as an EPUB, but it’s a poor tool for the job. Any of these apps are also good for casual layouts that you can just share as JPEGs or one-off prints.