PageMaker for Desktop Publishers

Design philosophy: all information in this web site should be accessible to the intended audience regardless of platform, browser, or size of screen. Graphics are kept to a minimum to reduce download times. If you see a frame or an animated GIF, feel free to flame me mercilessly.

This site uses fully compliant cascading style sheets (CSS). Older browsers should display text in their default fonts, while more recent browsers will all display fully formatted text. (However, the styles sheets will look best viewed in Internet Explorer 4.0 or above.) The site also complies with major accessibility standards.

Colophon

The base font for this page is Trebuchet MS, a free font from Microsoft designed for on-screen readability at small point sizes. The headlines are 32 pt Times bold italic, combining elegance, classical proportions, and compactness.

The logo is variation on the original logo from Aldus PageMaker and depicts Aldus Manutius, a student of Johannes Gutenberg and inventor of italics. This is to echo the roots of desktop publishing, both in the 1450s and the 1980s. The logo uses Courier from ITC to evoke the feel of metal type and Poetica from Adobe Systems to evoke the era of hand lettering.

Made on a Macintosh using Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia DreamWeaver.

December, 1999

You have reached the home page of the PAGEMAKR mailing list, an internet resource for desktop publishers, particularly users of Adobe PageMaker software. Our subscription base varies in size from 1,000-2,000, with a core of wonderfully knowledgeable and helpful members. Mail messages can be received as they are posted or once daily as a digest. You will find subscription instructions on the subscription help page.

Millennium Madness!

The coming change of years marks no ordinary new year celebration, or even fin de siècle — whether you choose January 1, 2000 or January 1, 2001, it will mark a new millennium. Much has been written about this “event” and if you're not interested, skip on down to the Book of the Month. All you need to know is: PageMaker 6.5 is Y2K compliant, the Mac OS is Y2K compliant, and Microsoft Windows 98 and NT are Y2K compliant (with “issues”) if you have been keeping up to date with the latest patches. No guarantees if your scripts use date calculations, though. Better check, just to be on the safe side!

As a desktop publisher, your main concern will be to make sure everyone spells “millennium” and “millennial” with two Ns. (If you don’t believe me, look it up in Mirriam Webster’s online dictionary.) Scary thought — in the past few years, hundreds of domains were registered to capitalize on Millennium Madness with the word “millennium” misspelled!

Where does the madness come from? Part of it is just the human need to celebrate, of course. But the millennium conjures up apocalyptic images to many people — partly based on a numerological love of round numbers, partly based on some obscure passages in the Christian bible. Both of these contain more mythology than fact. For one thing, a year ending in “000” is no rarer than a year ending in “958.” For another, even if you follow the Christian religion (less than a quarter of the earth’s population does), there seems to be no reason to think January 1, 2000 will be anything special. The Christian savior was born circa 7 B.C. by the Gregorian calendar, so even if the prophesies (and myriad interpretations thereof) in Revelation and Daniel were true, the apocalypse came and went no later than October, 1997 without anyone noticing. (Except possibly the Heaven’s gate cult!) For a thorough debunking, see either Questioning the Millennium by Steven Jay Gould or the essay “Whose Millennium?” in Otherness by David Brin.

But the main cause of madness this New Year’s Eve is the so-called “Y2K Bug.” Of course, this is not a bug at all, but a management failure. In the 1960s, it made perfect sense to abbreviate the year as two characters. Computers hard drive space was really expensive back then. Programmers did the best they could. But over the following three decades, management decided it was cheaper to let someone else fix the problem, even though the cost went up every year. As early as 1990, Arthur C. Clarke described the problem in his novel The Ghost of the Grand Banks, and Apple decided early on to make the Macintosh Y2K (now Y32K) compliant.

But in the mainframe computer world and the PC world, it wasn’t so easy, since the problem involved not just new products, but all the machines and programs that had already shipped. Still, one assumes that if someone other than management had been in charge, the problem would have been fixed years ago. Instead, companies waited until the late ’90s to act. In 1998, 25% of the PCs sold were not Y2K compliant, companies were coaxing retired COBOL programmers out of retirement with six figure salaries, and items like Y2K countdown clocks and T-Shirts had become hot gift ideas.

Where do we stand today? As usual, it’s a class issue. Well funded corporations, schools, and homes in the U.S. and other developed nations should have no trouble. The lights will stay on and the trains will be running throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, etc. But third world countries could see massive problems, and poor school districts in, say, Mississippi could suddenly have labs full of useless computers.

Thanks for sticking with me this far. As a reward, I’ll secretly tell you about two new documents on the site: one on troubleshooting damaged PageMaker documents, and one on doing footnotes in PageMaker. Enjoy! And I’ll see you — hopefully! — in January, 2000!

Book of the Month

Design Essentials cover Design Essentials (Professional Studio Techniques series) by Luanne Seymour Cohen et al.

Buy it online!

Although it only covers Photoshop and Illustrator, this little (97 pages) book from Adobe Press packs in a lot! From creating duotones, tritones, and quadtones in Photoshop to creating custom line effects (like railroad tracks), three dimensional boxes and charts in Illustrator, the book covers many advanced techniques in simple cookbook fashion. Full color throughout and printed and bound with top quality materials, it feels worth its rather hefty price tag (USD $39.99). For many users, the discussions of trapping, special type effects like antiquing and glow, and tips on creating smooth gradations alone are worth the price. The book easily paid for itself in one project when I was able to simplify the creation od a map with the books line drawing techniques.

Product of the Month

Those of you who do not own PageMaker 6.5 Plus — and I suspect that's a lot of you, since it really added little to warrant a paid upgrade — may be interested in this month's featured product: PrePage. One of the main enticements in PageMaker Plus is a set of templates beginners (and overworked pros!) can use to jump-start their projects. (Others are clip art, fonts, Photoshop LE, and PageMill. If you have no clip art, no fonts, no image editor, and no WYSIWYG web page editor, stop reading and go buy PageMaker 6.5 Plus!)

PrePage is a set of templates for PageMaker 6.0 and above with a fully illustrated book. The templates are by respected designer Chuck Green <chuckgreen@ideabook.com> (author of The Desktop Publisher's Idea Book, a definite Book of the Month candidate) and can be used in sets or individually, and, of course, customized as necessary. The projects range from awards to brochures to calendars to newsletters to “wearables” and include full instructions.

The main problem with PrePage is not the designs, which are great, but what's missing: clip art and fonts. The designs specify typefaces (most of which would be part of any designer's toolkit) but do nor provide them. However, you are free to substitute fonts you do have. (The book has a section on fonts, including a font substitution table.) Another minor problem is the file naming scheme. Suffice it to say it will be impossible to find the design you want without referring to the book.

These quibbles aside, PrePage is a fine product. It may be hard to justify the price today (USD $99 vs. $199 for the PageMaker 6.5 Plus upgrade), but those of you in the market for professionally designed templates should give PrePage a try, especially if your machine can’t handle PageMaker 6.5.

STEPPS -- Stop Tax Exempt Private Property Sprawl -- Framingham