Fall, 2001

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 1,400–2,000, 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, or you can write to a listowner at pagemakr-request@listserv.iupui.edu.

Our thoughts are with those people worldwide who were affected by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001.

To help with the relief effort, donate to the United Way of New York.

Apple, Adobe Show Off New Software

Adobe has announced that InDesign 2.0 will ship with improvements including faster performance. support for Mac OS X, XML (extensible markup language) import and export, transparency, table creation, a Glyph palette, a hyphenation zone slider bar, long document features ("group multiple documents into a book list for numbering pages sequentially and generating tables of contents and indexes"), and featuring a "streamlined new printing interface that reflects feedback from hundreds of print professionals" and tighter integration with other Adobe products, including the new Illustrator 10.

According to Adobe, the transparency feature is the first of its kind for page layout software, allowing users to apply editable drop shadows, feathering and opacity settings to objects and place transparent Photoshop, Illustrator and PDF files into InDesign. (All software written for Mac OS X can take advantage of transparency features built in to the OS. For instance, charts in Microsoft Excel X will have sophisticated transparency effects available.)

The new table features will allow users to convert tab-delimited text into tables and import Microsoft Word and Excel tables. Numerous table formatting features include alternating rows colors, changing row height and column width, and inserting graphics into cells. InDesign 2.0 can also export designs in the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format.

Like InDesign, the new version of Illustrator features SVG and Mac OS X support, and extends Adobe's vision for "network publishing" with enhanced integration with Photoshop and GoLive, HTML tables with Cascading Style Sheet layers, and support for SVG and Flash. Illustrator 10 also adds "live distortion" (bend, stretch and twist text, graphics and images) and "symbolism tools" ("naturalistic masses of repeating elements" such as foliage and crowds of people).

Previous versions of InDesign and Illustrator ran under Windows 2000, but were limited to running under "Classic" mode in Mac OS X, meaning they could not take advantage of the advanced features in the new operating system, such as protected memory and symmetric multiprocessing. The new version of Apple's Mac OS X, version 10.1, should be announced by Steve Jobs in a special satellite appearance during Apple VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller's September 25 keynote at Seybold San Francisco. In addition to numerous bug fixes and feature enhancements, version 10.1 will feature CD butning, DVD playback, and speed increases of up to 400%.

Adobe had already shipped PageMaker 7.0 this summer.

Next Month

Hopefully, I'll be back on a monthly schedule soon, with a Book of the Month and a Product of the Month. My apologies to those of you who have been disappointed by my laxity in updating the site so far this year.