Re: "Surely true black can be rendered in RGB, with a value of 0,0,0?"
"Once I would have found Publisher a welcome addition to the Office suite, now it's mostly a useless toy....InDesign CC is too expensive for occasional use."
Back in the mid-90s after I finished a group training of MS Publisher, one of the clients, a young girl, burst into tears. When I asked her what the problem was she explained she had been tasked with producing a monthly newsletter and that she now knew she'd never have enough time.
So, we did a cost-benefit analysis of using MS Publisher versus Pagemaker. A Pagemaker licence back then was well north of $AU1,000 and hiring me for a one-on-one training a further ~$AU400. Publisher may have been "free", but time is money. The cost difference looked like being amortised in 3–6 months.
As with most of my Pagemaker clients, the YL brought her first finished work for my perusal and very good it was, too. It helped that we had created a number of templates for the job during her training. The time-saving exceeded our original estimate.
The first book I created with InDesign more than justified the cost of the licence. The time-saving versus a low-end DTP tool can be quite dramatic. The book had over a thousand footnotes, only one of which had the required full stop at the end. Putting those in manually would have been a chore, but the GREP in InDesign made that a trivial task.
Hint: I purchased my first Pagemaker licence second hand for 20% of the RRP. That meant I paid very little more than for a "new" low end product.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
