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

Edit: Serif are in the article, sorry

> I think they were bought by Corel

Serif (makers of Affinity suite) were bought by Canva last year. So far, they’ve honored their perpetual licenses and still offer them, but it seems like a perilous proposition given Canva’s audience and sales model.

Was it Xara?

Corel licensed their software for a while and released it as CorelXARA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xara

No, not Xara --- I finally managed to remember:

Cerilica (company name) Truism (product name).

The last big RISC OS program written in BASIC and assembler. I published something through Cerilica called TextFX, also in BASIC and assembler.

There was also Composition, by a chap from New Zealand. Multiple transparent layers of any size and position, and and interesting system-wide plugin system.

That just makes me sadder that MacBasic wasn't available and more interested in trying RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi....

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.

And don't forget Stone Create

If we mentioned Stone Design Create, then we have to add Pages.app by Pages.

EDIT: but Create was more a drawing program than page layout.

Did Pages ever actually ship? I recall Bruce Webster who made a name as an author in the nascent NeXT community of the day stopped writing to pursue Pages.

But I never heard if it ever made it to market or with what feature set.

_NeXT Magazine_ described a DTP publishing package as "in the bag" after Pages by Pages was announced --- it was far enough along that Anderson Financial Services bought it to sell (and also got the afs.com domain name for marketing purposes).

Never been in that professional area but around 2000 InDesign (on Windows) was probably the 2nd name you had heard after QuarkXPress.

I mean I can't really speak with authority how much that (first IIRC) version of InDesign differed from this K2 or PageMaker but I think it was working well with Photoshop and ImageReady (both of which I knew from work before).

Would probably depend on how much it was more of a v2 or how much was a complete rewrite.

I lived through the whole thing. Aldus Pagemaker was king for a long while, then Quark came along, then Adobe bought Aldus to get their nascent PageMaker replacement (codenamed K2), dethroning Quark.

There were a lot of other programs along the way, esp. if you consider platforms other than Mac OS (and later Windows).

I still think someone needs to create an office suite which just used .md and .csv and similar plain-text source files for file formats, then all design variations are done via theming --- then, when it's time to produce a document professionally, what is provided is a clear plain text file with sensible markup which is easily converted into pretty much anything.