Anyone heard of this?

Not sure to post here or the design thread.
Mods feel free to move this at your discretion.

So being relatively new to the business, I thought there were at the most three pagination programs used to layout newspaper pages: Adobe InDesign, QuarkXpress and Adobe Pagemaker.
My friend just interviewed at this place however, and she said they use something called Harris Pagination.
They told her it's similar to InDesign.
Having never heard of it, she asked me if I could give her any tips on it.
I said I didn't even know Harris existed.
Then she said she watched a guy paginate with it while she was there, and said it uses a HTML-like language to create everything.
My question is then, has anyone here used, or know anything about Harris? Is it truly similar to InDesign?
She said they told her it wasn't hard to pick up, but added that when she sat in with someone using it, it looked to be different from anything she's used before.
I told her I'd ask around and see if anyone else had experience with it, so here I am.

 

Harris isn't uncommon. I've never used it, but I know some fairly big papers that use it.

 

Sounds fairly similar to DTI as well. DTI uses HTML-like coding in the text windows to create stuff on a page.

 

Huh, aight.
The place she interviewed at was something like a 18,000 circ daily.
She also told me it didn't sound like they were too picky in their search in that regard cause they were switching to InDesign sooner rather then later.
Maybe I'll tell her to come here and shed some of the details herself. I hate giving third-person info.
Hopefully I won't ever have to learn it on the fly myself, but if I do that's just one more thing to have experience in I suppose.
I've never heard of DTI, either.

 

Harris is no where close to DTI.
Harris was one of the first PC-based pagination systems. It was a fad in the mid 90s because of the low cost and it's ability to adapt with many PC-based frontend systems.
It's an awful pagination system. It's basically X,Y centric and pretty limiting on high-end design.

 

I used Harris for a while. It does have an HTML-like feel to it. Thing is, I haven't used it in five years and I still could code some basic results:

<aghed>High school boys[flush left command]
<el4><subag>Saturday's results[flush left command]
<el2><sub2ag>AT PODUNK[flush left command]
<el4><rules>FIRST-ROUND RESULTS[flush left command]
<el4></agat>Blah blah blah.

Something like that, anyways.

 

Looks like I've got some studying to do.
I was told at my interview that yes they use Harris and yes it's horrible but they're switching over, they just need a new back-end program. I think that's what it's called..the version below Jazbox is what they use now.
Would you say it's a complete overhaul going from Harris to InDesign then?
I haven't used anything else other than InDesign. And I guess quark.
I wish everyone used the same program, it'd make live soooooo much easier. Like a standard design program across the country. We're all doing the same thing, afterall.

 

There are several custom newspaper pagination software systems on the market, things the average person isn't going to be able to buy at CDW. Things that K-12 schools and universities will never think about getting, even the J-schools.

I've been using layout programs for 15 years in a variety of settings, and never once have I used anything that wasn't PageMaker, Quark or InDesign. Even if you know what you're doing, facing a non-WYSIWYG design program is an uncertain prospect.

Bottom line: if a newspaper is using a custom program, it would be a good thing to know it. But if you have never worked with it, they have a responsibility to teach you.

 

Harris is obscenely unreliable (crashes all the time). I can't tell you how many times a night someone at our paper is cursing Harris.

 

Right back atcha, design drones!

 

Isn't InDesign essentially the replacement program for PageMaker?

I prefer Quark to InDesign, myself. InDesign is much more labor-intensive, but it does have some cool features.

I worked at a shop seven years ago that was still cut-and-paste — pica poles, Xacto blades and all. That was an education.

 

The Post-Standard in Syracuse uses a customized version of Harris. From some who used it, it's a pain in the rump.