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.

Repairing a Greyed-Out Script Palette

by Yosuke Ichikawa, Johnathan G. BresselI, Berndt von Wahlde, and Geoffrey Heard

When I start Pagemaker on my Mac, the script palette is completely blank (or black, or grey, or in an inaccessible location). How do I get it back?

Delete "Script Palette Prefs" in your Preferences folder (Usually in the System Folder on the root directory of your hard disk) and restart PageMaker. The prefs file will be rebuild automatically, and this should solve the problem.

Macintosh "Prefs" files are similar to Windows "INI" files, but hold more data and are more fragile. It's almost always safe to remove a Prefs file (unlike an INI file) because the OS or the application will create a default one automatically. This can often solve mysterious problems on the Mac.

If you are running PageMaker with an old copy of Word (usually 5.1) and a newer OS (9.x) you may have run into an incompatibility problem. In this case, if Word is running when PageMaker starts, all of PageMaker's palettes can have problems.

Your trouble may go away if you launch PageMaker before Word and don't quit PageMaker. If the problem recurs, restart. However, some people find that just having Word 5 running is enough to cause problems with PageMaker. In this case the "solution" is to find another word processor, or restart after each use of Word.

It is not just the Styles menu, it is all that group of from
Show Colours to Show Hyperlinks.

The Library and Scripts palettes are NOT affected.

If I quit both, then launch PM, I still get the blacked out palettes.

MORE TIPS

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