The Killer

For many years, starting in 1990 on the Mac to 2000 on Windows, I was a heavy-duty user of QuarkXPress. I hardly ever touched Aldus/Adobe PageMaker, as it was never a serious tool for typesetting, and ditto with Acobe FrameMaker. But XPress was far from perfect and so in 2000 I jumped ship to Adobe InDesign 1.5 — and have hardly looked at QuarkXPress since then. QuarkXPress is bound for extinction, InDesign is the future, that was clear to me already back in 2000, when few designers took InDesign seriously. But its advanced justification engine (derived from Donald Knut's TeX), its thorough support for OpenType fonts, its excellent anti-aliased display of even tiny type and much more make this a killer app for lovers of typography. And each new version has brought further refinements.

The Bible

There are of course many fine books on typography, and I plan on buying and reading many more in the years ahead, but the one book which I regard as my Bible and from which I have learned the most — and which I keep returning to — is Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Type. It's superbly written (the author is supposedly also a poet of some renown) which I warmly recommend you to check out if you'd like to learn something about good typography. But it's a subtle, complex art, so don't be prepared to master this stuff in a weekend.