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.

Importing Excel spreadsheets into PageMaker

Often you will need to import an Excel file that is too difficult to re-do in PageMaker: there may be borders, or a chart, or complex number formatting, for instance, as in the example below. PageMaker and InDesign come with Excel import filters that work fairly well, importing numeric data, formulas, tables, and formatting, but they lose other features, like graphics and charts, page numbers, superscripting, and some other items. Fortunately, there are other ways of importing that data.

The best way, if you will be outputting to a PostScript printer, is to create an EPS graphic of the page. This EPS can then be placed into PageMaker and output at high resolution to your PostScript printer.

If you have a Mac, you can output directly to EPS from the Print dialog box. See Using Apple's LaserWriter 8 Driver to Create EPS Images for instructions.

On either a Mac operating system a Windows machine, you can save to a PostScript file and import that into Illustrator or Freehand to create the EPS. Note that you do not need a PostScript printer to create this file, just to print it. To create the file, all you need is a PostScript printer driver. If you don't have one installed, check the Adobe web site or your PageMaker installation CD.

On non-PostScript printers, Excel tables saved as EPS will generally be of poor quality, since all that will print will be the screen preview. In this case, you can import the PostScript file into Photoshop instead and rasterize it. Be sure to do this at high resolution, since bitmaps do nor resize as well as vector EPS. The resulting TIFF file will be large but should output well on any printer.

As a last resort, copy the table in Excel, go to PageMaker, and Paste Special. This uses OLE and can produce good results in-house, but may cause you to make enemies if you have to share the file or send it to a service bureau for output. Be sure you keep the source spreadsheet in the same folder as your publication.

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