Solicitation for MLayout review

skipjack

I tried out the demo for InDesign 2 a while ago, and it seemed to meet my simple needs but there were rumors of a revision. Then, Adobe announced the CS package and I ordered the academic version, which is yet to come in the mail.



Meanwhile, in another thread, boy_analog mentioned MLayout by a Korean company, softmagic.com . This seems to be a capable and polished program, but I have not been able to find any reviews of this software. I have only found mentions of the upgrade to version 1.55 and the 50% price reduction.



I am not a desktop publishing professional and really am only looking for a program for producing reports that handles images better than Word and Appleworks. MLayout is enough to make me consider cancelling my Adobe CS order.



Is anyone willing to download the MLayout demo and offer a quick review?



EDIT: I'll add my thanks-in-advance here so I don't bump the topic.

target practice

Quote:

Originally posted by Skipjack

Is anyone willing to download the MLayout demo and offer a quick review?

MLayout is very interesting, but targeted toward more complex publishing tasks where a strict separation of content and design is needed (e.g., publications with many content contributors, database publishing, dynamic web publishing, etc.) The MLayout approach is driven by its XML authoring and template/stylesheet features.



Pretty sophisticated stuff.

outsider

I've used it before and the user experience was very much like QuarkXPress version 4 or so. It was good. But the software is best used with the workflow software Softmagic is pushing. It's a complete solution but as you know it's extremely difficult to dethrone Quark as the king of DTP.