What's the industry standard for DTP software?

[The Seeker]

Hi.

Can anyone give me advice on what the industry-standard software is for desktop publishing?

I would like to change my career and train in something which will be useful in a publishing/marketing field. The work I'd do would be general non-technical, such as creating/updating pages for launch on websites, although some knowledge of how to create webpages would also be useful. I'm paying for a course myself, so I really need to know what is the most commonly used software before I part with my hard-earned cash.

Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Quark and Pagemaker are the applications I've heard of, but I'm not sure if they are relevant now and how useful they will be to me in a general publishing context.

Any help/ideas would be most appreciated.

Many thanks

[ian.miller]

Our publishing house uses Quark, but we're going over to InDesign in the near future because of it's greater integration with the other Adobe products.

Dreamweaver & Frontpage are web only, the other two are DTP.

Anything Adobe is always useful, but be prepared to join a long line of people wanting to be designers, almost as long as those wanting to be one of us editorial types - not sure why though.

[spaced]

Illustrator, InDesign, Quark and some use Microsoft Publisher (rubbish)

[Buenchico]

Quark has been used through out the newspaper and magazine industry for many years. (I love it. It's incredibly easy to get to grips with but immensely flexible as well).

As Ian says though, a lot of publishing houses are switching to InDesign because (among other things) it integrates so well with the industry-standard image manipulation software which is, of course, Photoshop.

My opinion is that someone working on magazines or newspapers would still do well to get some knowledge of Quark. Anyone expecting to work in advertising might find that going direct to InDesign would be better for them. Photoshop would be almost essential for advertising but less important for newspapers and magazines. I don't know a great deal about web design but, from what I've read, Dreamweaver might be your best option.

Chris