the leading industry standard at the moment for any graphic designer would be the CS suite and quarkXpress
InDesign is a good program but it still just doesnt compare to quark. quark handles much more, InDesign just looks like it does =D and you wont be able to do everything in just one program you will need multiple programs the CS suite includes Photoshop for editing your images, Illustrator for creating Vector, Dreamweaver and Flash for web etc.
But it also comes down to price, but professional grade would be the CS suite and quark.
Good Luck
Whew! I'm guessing you don't use CS a lot, right? I have been in the printing industry for 34 years... seen a lot...
I've beta tested Quark, Freehand, Illustrator and InDesign (when it was code named ""KK")..
HANDS DOWN, the creative suite wins... on a budget, you could get just InDesign as you can do 75% of what you would use Illustrator for within InDesign... you can illustrate with the same tools within InDesign.. so, you would actually get pagination as well as illustration... (albeit, the illustration part would be less than getting Illustrator)...
Quark is an $800 program that if you spend around $4,000 on various extensions can get some jobs done... The ONLY thing I believe it does better is create web documents (down and dirty)... other than that, it will probably soon die away... Currently, we receive 99.9% InDesign native or created files and I think the last Quark file I saw was over two months ago...
So, I would recommend to NOT buy into a dying system....