: Is it possible to tell from a printed sample what software/layout algorithm was used? Is there a way to determine, or at least hazard a guess at, which page layout engine was used in the

@Tiffany317

I think your question really is missing the words "by a careless typesetter" somewhere in there. For instance, InDesign assigns leading as a character attribute, unlike Quark. The leading of any given line in InDesign is therefore the largest character in the line. Since that would include the hidden paragraph mark at the end of the last line, if the leading of the last line of a paragraph is larger than all the rest, then you can pretty much bet that that text was set in InDesign. By a careless or rushed typesetter/designer.

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@Reiling762

If you see optically aligned fully justified columns of text it's highly likely they've been set in InDesign. Quark can do it as well nowadays but they didn't for much longer than InDesign.

Multi-line composer is something Quark still hasn't got. Not that I would know. So narrow columns (like in newspapers) of text seem to have less rivers of wordspacing. They seem more uniform if they're set in multi-line composer. It does its job brilliantly. It's somehow based on the old URW's algorithm from the 80' that's based on Gutenberg's work on the bible.

But more than that I think it's not possible to tell.

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@Michele215

Just by looking at the final page layout? I don't think there's really any easy way to tell in most cases regardless of the type of publication. I think that if a layout engine has been refined to produce good layouts and a human has cleaned up the results (i.e., Xtags with QuarkXpress), then it would be all but impossible to tell.

Science and math technical publications that use a LaTeX variant have a distinct look but that's really only because of the specific set of fonts that are required to use it. But my company's math books have fairly sophisticated layouts done in LaTeX or Framemaker (though the latter is rare these days) that typically start as InDesign templates. Only the production staff would know there was a difference because of the rare compromise that sometimes happens.

I say that from my experience of creating marketing materials in InDesign with only Applescript (drop in an XML and the script handles the rest including layout cleanup). Even after porting the templates from Quark to InDesign, the results are indistinguishable from each other beyond the fact that my script doesn't make as many layout errors as the designers did when they were doing it by hand.

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