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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.

March, 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, or you can write to a listowner at pagemakr-request@listserv.iupui.edu.

Adobe announces InDesign 1.5. FrameMaker 6.0,
but not PageMaker 7.0

Adobe Systems has announced version 1.5 of InDesign, their new flagship desktop publishing application, and versions 6.0 of FrameMaker, their solution for publishing long documents. InDesign 1.0 customers can upgrade for $99; the full package costs $699. Many users of InDesign have expressed displeasure at Adobe for charging for the 1.5 update, noting that many of the new features were ones on their list of features that should have been implemented before 1.0 came out. But in an article on MacCentral <http://www.maccentral.com/news/0003/15.adobe.shtml>, Adobe defended its decision to charge for InDesign 1.5, noting that with "over 70 new features," version 1.5 offers a lot for the money. John Cunningham, European business development manager for Adobe, said that "people have always paid for upgrades."

FrameMaker costs $799 for Mac and Windows versions, or $1329 for the "Unix personal" version.

InDesign addresses many complaints about the original version, including trapping, text on a path, vertical justification, a plug-in manager, printer and PDF export styles, and an Eyedropper tool. Along with text on a path, the update includes new drawing tools that simplify creating clipping paths, drawing freehand, smoothing paths, and removing unwanted points. InDesign still lacks book, table of contents, and indexing, although these can be done with scripts and plug-ins (e.g. Sonar Bookends).

Adobe offers a detailed look at InDesign's new features in a PDF file on the Adobe Web site.

New features offered in FrameMaker 6.0 include enhanced Web support and improved book management, as well as XML output and integration with Acrobat and GoLive. Adobe offers FrameViewer 6.0 software, an online viewer for electronic FrameMaker documents. In FrameViewer, the cross-references, indexes and tables of contents that were created in FrameMaker automatically become hypertext links, making it a useful (but hardly indispensible) tool for large organizations. For more information, visit <http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker>.

So where does this leave PageMaker?

In a recent PC World article <http://www.idg.net/gomail.cgi?id=149320>, David Evans, InDesign product manager, is quoted as saying "There are certainly people doing professional print publishing with PageMaker, but the majority of its users are on the Windows platform. Future versions will be more focused on business publishing with templates and wizards."

Adobe is pushing InDesign, its former Quark Killer, to the professional print community and nudging PageMaker, its former Quark rival, into business publishing with new ease-of-use features like templates and a toolbar. Much has been written over the last year about Adobe's indifference to PageMaker, but little has changed. PageMaker 6.5.2, long the state of the art before "Plus," hasn't had a single update since the time of Merlin (seemingly). However, as I noted last month, Adobe has announced that all its Mac products will be Carbon compliant. Since Adobe has no plans to discontinue PageMaker, there must be a new version of PageMaker in the works.

All this is pure speculation, of course (just try to get an Adobe rep to make an official comment on anything) but keep an eye out on the Adobe home page, especially around the time of Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference, held in San Jose May 15-19, where Apple is expected to hand out Mac OS X beta CDs to developers and announce a ship date. Numerous developers will likely be on hand to announce their products for OS X, and maybe Adobe will be there with PageMaker 7......

Book of the Month

Adobe FAQ by the Adobe tech support team (Adobe Press, US $42.50)

Buy it online!

This is a compendium of frequently asked questions about a wide range of Adobe products, including PageMaker, Photoshop, and Acrobat. However, it is better organized and included tutorials, tips, and workarounds for questions that don't have simple solutions. In addition to this, it includes a CD-ROM full of updates, patches, fonts, plug-ins, and print drivers, for Macintosh, Windows, and Unix products which is almost worth the purchase price all by itself. Intended mainly for support staff, this is a valuable resource for anyone using Adobe products (at least those of us who don't live across the street from an Adobe tech support rep!).

Product of the Month

InDesign 1.5. The addition of a plug-in manager and type on a path tools make this the first really compelling version of InDesign. Buy InDesign products at Amazon! However, if you're happily using PageMaker or Frame, why switch? There's simply no compelling reason — yet. Adobe's forthcoming inCopy workflow management tool looks very promising, and will probably pave the way for InDesign's acceptance and many large organizations. And if Quark stumbles with QuarkXPress 5.0, there could be more acceptance of InDesign — especially if Adobe continues to be as aggressive with its InDesign upgrade schedule.

I considered FrameMaker, but my feeling is that eventually Adobe will roll the various features of both Framemaker and PageMaker into InDesign and offer it in various configuration, with the full version including Stilton and inCopy (for discussion of these products, see the Adobe web site or my write-up of Seybold Boston 2000) and the lower end version taking the place of PageMaker, with scripts to automate many tasks like booklets and PDF creation.