What new and revolutionary DTP/pagelayout features would you like to see?

September 11, 2005 6:25 AM

Graphicdesignerfilter: With the rise of Indesign and to a smaller extent, Scribus as major page layout applications, is anyone else underwhelmed by new, revolutionary features? What features would you like to see in page layout apps that currently don't exist? I'm not talking about improvements to current applications, but something totally new that will make the practical and/or creative end of page layout better.

Me, I'd like to see the ability to individually control the sides of boxes ala CSS, ala making the right side 5pt solid and blue while the left side would be 1 point dotted and grey. It would be nice to be able to apply this to circles and rounded boxes also.

Having an easy way to make tapered ends (i.e. being able to draw a single line that was thick at one end and think at another) would be nice.

posted by Brandon Blatcher to media & arts (5 comments total)

For what it's worth Apple's Pages has made some innovations in the way things are done, but they're marketing it as a word processor as it lacks high-end DTP functionality.
posted by wackybrit at 7:27 AM on September 11, 2005

I want the magic button that I push that says "Design and lay out that 12-page newsletter" so I can go outside for a bike ride while the Mac does the work.

Not being flippant, BB. Indesign does pretty much everything I want. Even Quark 6 does most of what I want. It's still a car, though: I still have to drive it. I can't sit back and read a book while the machine does it itself.
posted by zadcat at 10:33 AM on September 11, 2005

I'd like some sort of way to assure the client that just because the graphic looks huge on the screen, doesn't mean that it's going to print out that large. (The whole 72 pixel vs 150/300 pixel thing)
posted by idiotfactory at 4:22 PM on September 11, 2005

Me, I'd like to see the ability to individually control the sides of boxes ala CSS, ala making the right side 5pt solid and blue while the left side would be 1 point dotted and grey. It would be nice to be able to apply this to circles and rounded boxes also.

Ugh! Why? *displays offended aesthetic principles, and envisions this feature used in hideous direct mail advertisements with 50-fonts-deep font montage hell*

Having an easy way to make tapered ends (i.e. being able to draw a single line that was thick at one end and think at another) would be nice.

CorelDraw! has done this since like version 5 or 6. (Say, 1996? 1997?)

It'll even convert these lines to pure bezier curves, so it's not just a simple 1-dimensional bezier curve with meta-data on it, and they're fully exportable as AI or EPS. I believe this tool also supports pressure sensitive drawing tablets like Wacom, just like a pressure sensitive brush in Photoshop - but vector.

It's one of the tools I use to do stuff like this and this.

What features would you like to see in page layout apps that currently don't exist?

I want an entirely new interface. A high resolution flat panel screen the size of a drawing table or drafting desk. Touch screen. Supporting at least ten points of contact at once, instead of just one mouse pointer. It should be pressure sensitive, and have a small array of multi-function "tools" or "pens" or brushes you actually grab and use like traditional design/illustration implements. A major bonus would be tactile feedback. I want to be able to feel the screen, too.

It should be a hybridization of the best parts traditional design/layout workflow, with all the benefits of paperless DTP, with it's multithreaded, undoable workflow. I want to be able to grab a text box and stretch both corners simultaneously, or grab a shape and manipulate it with both hands. I want to be able to fingerpaint haphazardly and chaotically, or cut, mask, and paste with ten or hundred thousandths of an inch precision.

There's only a few reasons why DTP won out over traditional publishing media: It was cheaper, it's faster, it's undoable, and it requires less fine motor skills and less art skills.

Otherwise as an interface and medium, DTP is a terrible, terrible way to do good graphic designs and layouts. The whole "single point of contact" thing with GUI computers has always bothered me so much, and not just in graphic design.

Putting interface issues aside, I'd also like to see more interactive 'self-generating' tools for both artwork and layouts, like zadcat mentions. But ones that aren't clunky and don't suck, preferably based on decent AI, fractal algorithms, or fuzzy logic.

Kai's Power Tools and Alien Skin photoshop type plugin crap doesn't count - that's just bad candy for the most part.

It doesn't seem like it would be too hard to do a simple (but not a plain template!) 'newsletter layout' plugin that responded to image tags as anchors for text flow, and where you had obvious parameters like "size, depth, gutter, format, font choices, colors" for the newsletter, and less obvious and more esoteric parameters like "whitespace, text flow, image sizing relative to text/columns " and whatnot.

But then, by the time you activated, entered and tuned your parameters, you could practically lay out and paginate the newsletter in PageMaker or QuarkXpress. Well, maybe not in Quark. *grumbles*

A really good random/fuzzy/AI style guide generator would be nice, too. Something that had a zen-like pseudograsp of aesthetics.
posted by loquacious at 4:09 AM on September 12, 2005 [2 favorites]

Use Corel Ventura. It does it all, plus some. Go hunt up a comparison between Ventura and the other bigname page layout apps: you'll see there are none that are more powerful. There is no better long-document/structured-document layout application available to the general public. It is used extensively in the post-secondary textbook industry, directory industry, database->catalog industry, and bible industry.

(The latter weirds me out. I should think that once one has the bible's content assigned styles, you've pretty much cornered the market: two minutes tweaking the styles, and you've got an entirely new appearance.)
posted by five fresh fish at 9:49 PM on September 12, 2005