Sounds like a good idea - I was just suggesting PP as an interim step if you needed something quickly. It exports TIF files that are better than what you can get from Excel. On reflection, probably not good enough to get up to 600 dpi and usable for print.

For immediately illustrator worked. I was desperate because I thought I was not going to find anything free or cheap that made graphs natively and could produce high res output. For all its problems I was able to get what I needed from Illustrator. Also in the long run I suspect if I'm going to be a professional writer of non-fiction, the need to supply high quality graphics will be ongoing. Intermittent use, not continuous. So user friendliness more important than maximum productivity once mastered. At one time I would have said "Aldous Pagemaker" but if that program still exists I doubt it is current. What is today's equivalent of Aldous Pagemaker, powerful, user-friendly but not necessarily the highest productivity for large jobs or repeated tasks? A lot of handholding for people who don't know what they are doing. Someone who does know what they are doing may curse at the high number of steps some tasks take, but even as they curse there is a way to get those tasks done.

What sort of hassle would I be looking at if I wanted to set up a partition on my currently-used Mac Mini that booted Tiger instead of Snow Leopard? I'd rather not have to wipe the whole thing and start over again from scratch, but since I have Time Machine backups on a network drive, maybe that wouldn't be such a big thing. I am, however, exceedingly lazy.

(The reason I'm wanting to do this is that Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 doesn't play well with Snow Leopard. I know, I know, it's outdated, but it's a darn expensive batch of software that I don't use enough to justify buying the new version.)

...Incidentally, for my first publication in grad school I totally did the Excel graphs -> PowerPoint -> TIF thing. I still can't believe my advisor and the publisher let me get away with that.

Typo Boy, Adobe bought Pagemaker. [link]

Is Pagemaker still current? I thought it had been outcompleted, and fallen way behind in capability.

OK, 7 was the version from 2001. Officially does not run on Windows 7 though I bet it does. I don't care about obsolete if I can get my work done.

Pagemaker hasn't been updated since 2004. From what I understand it won't install on anything newer than WinXP, which means even Win Vista is out of the question. On the Mac side version 7 will only install into OS9, it won't work at all on Intel Macs, and it doesn't run very well in Classic mode under OS X, so Adobe's best recommendation on the Mac is to run it on a Mac that can natively boot in OS9.

And pagemaker is not even cheaper than other options. Several people have told me the goto DTP for someone who needs power, but does not know what they are doing is Indesign. Don't know what someone who does know what they are doing would use that is different. If you can live without DTP power there are cheaper options depending on what you can do without. As my book pulls into homestretch, I'm look at self-publishing a graphic version as an accompaniment. (Publisher is fine with this, wrote permission in contract.) There are all sorts of $30 to $100 DTP things out there. The problem is that I don't really know what I need. Also, while I'm going to do a rough draft to save money, ultimately if I self publish I'll have to turn to pay a professional to turn into into a decent quality work. That is I'll select the graphics, but I'll need someone to look it over and tell me which graphic are good, which I need to replace. And then the professional will need to use photoshop polish up the graphics. And while I'll decide which text goes with which graphic and where I want to keep stuff on the same page, or same two facing pages, layout should be done by someone who knows what they are doing - both in the macro sense (choosing fonts and making layout decisions for the whole book) and micro (doing page by page layout). 190-250 pages mostly graphics 10,000 words at most maybe less. Don't know a professional will charge for that kind of work. Maybe out of my range but I'm hoping that since I'll be supplying graphics and copy-edited text, that it won't be an impossible figure. Since I'm asking for some decision making (macro layout and critiquing graphic choices) and also photo editing where necessary I don't know if what I'm asking for is considered layout or general DTP or maybe layout+graphic editing or what that would be classified as. I mean maybe I don't need a DTP at all. If I'm going to use a professional anyway, maybe I just give them a word file with square brackets saying "insert graphic so and so here" along with all the graphics, and little notes telling them what I want kept together on pages. And they don't have screwups on my part of fix. They edit graphics if needed (beyond sizing I mean). Maybe I use Powerpoint to show when I want graphics and text combined in a very specific way, but still give them the raw files to implement what I want more professionally than I can.

Don't know how big a job this would be. Maybe it would be easier for whoever I hire if I made a mockup of the book with a low-cost DTP package. So in addition to specifications and raw files, they would end up with a pdf that is too low quality to take any images from, but that would be a poorly implemented version of the book to look at if they had questions about what I had in mind. As long as we made it clear that the point is to show where multiple images are to be combined into a single image and what I'm trying to convey, and what text goes with what image, and what combined text and image goes on what page, and that I still expect a much better layout than the example. The one danger of providing a low quality example is that professional might produce something that looked too much like the example.

I use InDesign and it works great. It does have a learning curve, but it's pretty small. I like it a lot, and it's pretty easy to come up with a professional looking layout. It also makes it simple to collaborate with my graphic designer, since she's already using Adobe.

What does a graphic professional cost? There are two learning curves here. I'm confident I could learn InDesign quickly. I'm not confident that would make me a layout person. If I can give a graphics person A) Text in Microsoft Word and seperate graphics and instructions B) A really ugly InDesign file and instructions (maybe with raw text and graphics just in case), would the graphics person find any particular advantage in B over A?