How you can help!

You can donate money to offset the cost of hosting the site with Paypal by clicking the "donate" button above.

About This Site

Maintained by Peter C.S. Adams and Gordon Woolf.

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.

January, 2000

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.

Happy New Year!

Well, if you're reading this, Y2K did not destroy the world wide web. Did you get the new computer you wanted? Some clip art? A digital camera? I hope whatever holiday you observed, it was fulfilling and enlightening. There were certainly a lot to choose from this year: Christmas, Hanukkah, Ramadan, Kwanzaa, and the winter solstice, to name a few. And just to keep the ball rolling, here's a late gift from me to you: a calendar generator. It requires Microsoft Excel, and is simple to use: just type in the date you want, say January 1, 2000, and it generates that month's calendar. Download calendar.xls and you can create a calendar for any month between January, 1904 and December 2099. I could probably extend the range, but it that was all I needed. Yes, it's Y2K compliant — provided your computer and your copy of Excel are! You can use it just as a way to see what day you were born, or use Excel's built-in export capabilities to create a table based calendar for your web page or an EPS based calendar you can import into PageMaker. As an example, here is the calendar for January, 2000.

What made New Year's Eve 1999 special to me was watching "Millennium 2000" on PBS (public broadcasting in the US). Over the hours, we watched midnight as it swept across the Pacific, Asia, and Europe. After a while, they began checking back with previous sites to see sunrise of January 1, 2000. Particularly lovely, I thought, were midnight in Paris and Moscow — the fireworks over St. Basil's cathedral and the Eiffel Tower were spectacular — and sunrise in Sydney. Several brave souls climbed on top of the Sydney opera house to perform an original composition for saxophone, Japanese wood flute, and voice. Also of note were greetings from Nunuvut, the newest Canadian province, and a Chinese performance of a modern dance welcoming dawn on the beach of a southeastern province whose name I did not catch. It was wonderful to watch, especially when I reflected on how international the PAGEMAKR list is, and how I had conversed with many of you in many of these sites.

So happy new year to all of you, whenever you think the new year begins and whatever you think the year is. According to the current Mayan Great Cycle, it's 5119; in the Egyptian calendar, it's 6236; in the old Roman calendar, it's 2753; in the ancient Babylonian calendar, it's 2749; in the Buddhist calendar, it's 2544; to the Muslims, it's 1379; to the Jews, it's 5762. Numbering from the earliest known human artifact (cave paintings at Chauvet), this is the year 32,414! How's that for perspective? (And the only reason some of us celebrate on January 1 is due to a whim of some senators in the ancient Roman Empire.)

Book of the Month

Real World Scanning and Halftones by David Blatner, Glenn Fleishman, Stephen F. Roth.

Buy it online!

This is possibly the most important book you can own if you are involved in imaging and prepress. Even if you don't own a scanner, the information will prove invaluable if you ever output anything involving halftoning (for instance, screen shots, PhotoCD images, or color/greyscale EPS clip art).

This reference will walk you through virtually every aspect of the process, from the basics of scanning to the most advanced aspects of imagesetter output. Unsure what the difference between pixels per inch, dots per inch, and lines per inch is? Not sure what resolution to use when scanning? Wondering what to do with that 1024x768 image from your digital camera to make it a nice and sharp in your PageMaker document? Real World Scanning and Halftones will explain it all.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Even if you already own the first edition, the revisions in the second edition are worth a look. Five stars!

Product of the Month

Speaking of scanners, mine came with Photoshop 2.5, and I finally upgraded all the way to 5.5, having used 3.0 and 4.0 on other people's computers. I think I am finally happy with a release of Photoshop. I still don't know how to use most of it, mind you, but the feature I use most has become both more powerful and easier to use. That's a rare achievement in the software world, and Adobe should be commended on the excellent job they did in melding the best features of ImageReady — a largely redundant product to begin with — into the normally difficult Photoshop.

I've always been a little baffled and intimidated by Photoshop, and am only slowly learning about the best new features of version 5.0 and 5.5 — actions and the history palette — but even for someone who uses Photoshop as little as I do, this upgrade was worth the price of admission for the web optimization alone. Text handling is better, too, and you can now create contact sheets for all images in a directory and save them as web pages. The enhancements are many, and, of course, the hardware requirements are steep, but the Photoshop development team — alone among all the teams at Adobe, I think — are doing a good job of watching the competition, taking the industry leading product, and answering the challenge. Not that the product is flawless, but it's as close to five starts as you get in the world of computer software.

If you work with images enough to need something more than a shareware product, Photoshop 5.5 is highly recommended. View Photoshop 5.5 products at amazon.com.