Desktop Publishing Tools That Didn't Make It (2022)

20 rbanffy 7 7/9/2025, 6:04:14 PM tedium.co ↗

Comments (7)

taeric · 44m ago
Reminds me of printing cards at home. Reading, I almost skipped over where this referenced Print Shop, as I didn't recognize the name. Their article for that, https://tedium.co/2016/06/02/the-print-shop-banner-decade/, is ridiculously nostalgic. I think I can hear that main banner printing.
rbanffy · 25m ago
I remember Publish It for the Apple //e. It was unbelievably good for a 1 MHz CPU. And the print quality on a dot matrix was also impressively good (even though it didn’t use the maximum possible 244 dpi my printer had)

We have to cut some slack for the titles from platforms that died - it wasn’t completely their fault at least.

taeric · 6m ago
I confess complete bewilderment that Print Shop is still around! It is called out for not being on the main list because it is still selling. Holy crap!
WillAdams · 25m ago
A few which weren't listed:

- Calamus --- a German tool based on a document model, it was pretty interesting

- Ready-Set-Go --- this was a contender, with a quite vocal fanbase

- Microsoft Publisher --- this was just announced as development ceasing

and the cool British program which did ink mixing and took paper characteristics into account whose name I can't recall.... (and was hoping would be listed)

Kind of silly to list PageMaker, since its successor, K2 became InDesign (which was so promising, Adobe bought Aldus), and Serif Page Plus, since Serif now publishes their Publisher application (fortuitous name choice for them).

jamesbooker83 · 1m ago
You mention a British program. I do not know about the specific features you mention, but a British company called Serif used to make very highly-regarded DTP software.

I think they were bought by Corel

pavel_lishin · 8m ago
Publisher was incredible. I remember using it to make websites - giant imagemaps! - as well as a mock newspaper for our high school that we managed to get in trouble for.
insane_dreamer · 11m ago
PageMaker was awesome -- and ultimately transformed into InDesign -- which is excellent.