Dilemma: To Quark, or not to Quark?

[woody649]

Years (decades, in fact) ago, I used a desktop publishing program called Publish-It! from a company named Timeworks. Although there is a program currently on the market called Publish It, it's not at all the same program, and the current publishers have confirmed to me that the current program is really aimed at greeting cards and not much more.

My old Publish-It! was good for a lot more than greeting cards. I used it to produce a quarterly newsletter for a non-profit, and even to produce a book for one of the members of the board of directors of the non-profit. Functionally, it worked a lot like Quark Xpress, without the sophisticated colr handling capabilities.

Alas, Publish-It! is no more. I went to the Quark Xpress web site, hoping to find a "lite" version, which would be all I need and which might be a bit more affordable than the full version. They don't offer a "lite" version, but through the live chat one of their sales drones offered me a one-time deal of $402 for a perpetual license to the current version.

It's tempting. A huge incentive is that it includes a function to export to reflowable ("responsive") HTML format. Since HTML is essentially the same as EPUB, that should make self-publishing e-books without conversion errors a snap. But ... the special price they're offering is $402, which is a lot for an old retired guy who depends on freeware for much of his computing needs.

I need to hit the lottery.