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.

Formatting Tab Leaders in PageMaker

To set a tab stop in PageMaker, select the text tool and place it in the paragraph you want and select "Indents/Tabs" from the Type menu and drag the tab stop where you want it on the ruler. Or better, define a style and click on the Tabs button to set the tab's position. Select a tab stop (left, right, center, or decimal) and place it on the ruler. This allows you to precisely position text at, say, 4" or the right margin. But suppose you want something like this:

Cheese Enchiladas . . . . . . . . . . . . $6.95

This is called a "tab leader." To create one, select the paragraph (or style) you want to edit and open the Tabs ruler. Select the tab stop you want to edit and specify the leader in the small text-entry box in the middle of the Tabs ruler window. Unlike most programs, PageMaker allowsyou to type in two characters, so you can separate the perions with spaces, as in the example above.

Now, what if you want the text and the tab leader to be formatted differently? For instance, in the example above, the text is bold, but the periods are not. The trick is that PageMaker formats the tab leader the same way as the character immediately preceding the tab. Since you can't format the tab itself, insert a space before the tab and format the space as you want, whether it's just removing bold or actually changing the font. The tab character and the leaders will take the size, font, and formatting you applied to the preceding character.

In this way, you could even set your type in Garamond, but use a dingbat or printer's flower from Zapf Dingbats as your tab leader. (If that's what you really want!)

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