VERDICT: A modern cross-media technical publishing solution – that at its centre is old-fashioned and in need of a major overhaul.

We live in a fast-changing, global, consumer society and just about every product, and minor product variation, needs to come with its own technical documentation...

VERDICT: Improved handling of single-source repurposing and new support for rich media and Unicode – but Framemaker is still crying out for a core overhaul.

Framemaker was one of the first DTP packages and this year celebrates its 21st birthday...

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VERDICT: New effects enable richer design results while a host of other improvements boost productivity.

By combining photos from Photoshop and illustrations from Illustrator with its own text, layout, formatting and output strengths, InDesign CS3 stands out as the central application in Adobe’s vision of the modern publishing workflow. It also stands out because it is the only one of the three main CS3 design applications that faces any serious competition.

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VERDICT: Powerful and award-winning new versions of InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator – and now Acrobat 8 Professional too.

So here they are – the new professional platforms for both print and web design have arrived...

Tom Arah looks at the surprising history of professional desktop publishing and the current state of play.

The generally-accepted wisdom is that desktop publishing (DTP) was invented by Steve Jobs and Apple with the launch of the Apple Mac in 1984. It’s certainly true that the Mac’s Graphical User Interface (GUI) enabled bitmapped fonts, images and layouts to be both viewed onscreen and printed – a whole new world compared to character-based PC systems.

VERDICT With its enhanced interface, support for transparency and new collaboration features, QuarkXPress 7.0 is the best release in years.

At one time QuarkXPress had the world of high-end publishing virtually to itself. However, those days are long gone.

Tom Arah investigates how to bring your colour under control

In these days of full-colour displays, budget colour lasers and photo-quality inkjets it might seem that computer-based colour handling is hardly an issue. But when you need accurate and consistent colour it’s another matter entirely...