Users of PageMaker, the page-layout program that helped launch the desktop publishing industry back in 1985, have been yearning for an upgrade for over two years. Now, under the banner of Adobe Systems, the program has been discreetly but thoroughly overhauled, with results that most users should find very welcome.
Adobe has beefed up the program with more than 50 new features, at last delivering some of the high-powered page-layout, typographic, and color capabilities that users have come to expect in professional page-layout software. Not surprisingly, many of PageMaker’s new features make the program look, feel, and act more like its rival, QuarkXPress.
Page-Design Features
Many of PageMaker’s new features are hardly innovative, but they’re welcome news to PageMaker users who have bemoaned the program’s lack of pagedesign muscle. For example, the program now allows you to group and lock objects on a page, align and distribute groups of objects, and move items forward or backward one layer at a time. These are basic features, but they’ve been missing from PageMaker for a long time.
Another long-awaited enhancement: PageMaker documents no longer limit you to one master page (a page that can be used as a template to create new document pages). In each document, you can create up to 256 master pages. The new Master Page palette lists all the master pages in your document, and a pop-up menu on the palette allows you to create and name new master pages or edit existing ones. To apply a new master page, you choose the Apply command from the Master Page palette — or just double-click on a master-page icon.
A great feature — one conspicuously absent in QuarkXPress — is the ability to create a new master page from an existing document page. You simply choose the Save As command from the Master Page palette’s pop-up menu and assign the new master a name. The displayed document page then becomes a master page.
PageMaker’s Toolbox is also improved. The Zoom tool is now in the Toolbox, allowing you to easily drag-select an area to zoom into it. (On the downside, though, you can’t specify a level of magnification by typing in a value.) You can set preferences for each tool simply by clicking on it. The new Polygon Tool lets you specify the number of sides the polygon has, as well as the degree of insets, so starburst-type shapes are easy to create and customize. Unfortunately, you can only create regular polygons with sides of equal length.
One complaint; PageMaker’s Undo command is still abnormally lame. It won’t work with most formatting changes; for example, you can’t undo changes made with the Style and Colors palettes.
You can now search for and replace text based on a wide range of character and paragraph-level attributes. Also, you can paste copied text into the fields of the Find and Change dialog boxes, instead of having to type it out. This is another feature long available to QuarkXPress users.
For creating tables, PageMaker now comes with Adobe Table, a separate application that allows you to build and format tables that can be embedded directly in a PageMaker document via OLE 2.0, or exported and placed as a graphic (EPS or PICT). When you add a new table to a PageMaker document using the Insert Object command, Adobe Table opens automatically. The table you then create is embedded within the current PageMaker page. While Adobe Table makes it easy to design a table and apply borders, shading, and text insets, it can handle only basic table editing. Another problem: You can’t embed an existing Adobe Table document directly in PageMaker using the Insert Object command; you have to create a new table, then open the existing table from within Adobe Table and copy and paste its contents into the new table. It’s a clumsy workaround. (On the other hand, QuarkXPress has no built-in table-editing tools at all.)
Color Publishing
Adobe has significantly bolstered PageMaker’s color-handling capabilities. Most notably, the program now supports the Kodak Precision Color Management System (KPCMS) to help deliver more consistent color on screen and to printers. With the Kodak system, you specify device profiles for your output device and monitor. The color-management software then adjusts colors to render them more accurately on your equipment. Of course, as with any color-management system, the resulting colors are still approximations, and you must have accurate profiles supporting your display and output devices for the system to work at all. The KPCMS comes with profiles for 60 monitors. (If a device profile for your monitor is not available, but you know the white point and phosphor values for the monitor, you can create your own profile.) PageMaker’s color system supports other models, so other companies could write plug-ins that make models like Apple’s ColorSync 2.0 available in PageMaker, in addition to Kodak’s.
For spot-color work, PageMaker’s selection of color libraries has been expanded. The Pantone collection now includes libraries for metallics, fluorescents, and pastels, as well as Pantone’s new Hexachrome libraries for high-fidelity color support.
Another particularly useful color enhancement is the ability to assign tints of existing colors to objects and text (instead of defining a completely new color with the specified tint). As in QuarkXPress, you can apply tints at any percentage from the Type Specifications and Fill and Line dialog boxes, as well as from the Colors palette itself. What PageMaker still lacks, however, is the ability to create two-color blends for objects — a much-used feature in QuarkXPress.
Several other small changes make it much easier to work with PageMaker’s Colors palette. The palette now contains a None option, so you can easily remove colors from an object with a mouse-click. Another real convenience is the Remove Unused button in the Define Colors dialog box. Clicking on the button cleans up your interface by intelligently removing from the Color palette any colors that are not actually used in a document.
Graphics and Printing
Not surprisingly, PageMaker, as reinterpreted by Adobe, includes a strong suite of graphics and printing features. For the first time, the program includes integrated automatic trapping for objects and text created within PageMaker, by incorporating the former Aldus TrapMaker plug-in. You can set trap widths and thresholds and specify overprinting for black text, lines, and fills.
You can now directly import Photo CD images and sharpen, crop, and colorbalance them within PageMaker. New filters have been added to import graphics created in ClarisWorks, as well as PC files in CMX and ODBC formats.
The new PageMaker provides a richer set of tools for manipulating images without third-party image-editing software. Because the program now supports Adobe Photoshop Filters, you also can do full-blown special-effects editing on color TIFF images within PageMaker. To manipulate a TIFF image, you just select it and choose the Photoshop Effects command from the Element menu. This provides access to all available filters (which must be stored in a special Plug-ins folder along with PageMaker’s other support files). A dialog box lets you preview the results of each filter before applying it. (A collection of Adobe Gallery Effects filters comes with PageMaker to get you started.) If you are a Photoshop or an Illustrator user, PageMaker allow's you to launch those programs automatically by double-clicking on the graphics that were created with them.
One feature that is not new — but is more conveniently located — is PageMaker’s ability to save and store your most frequently used printer settings as printer styles. When it’s time to print, you simply select (from the File menu) one of the printer styles you’ve created, and PageMaker restores all of your settings for the target printer. This feature used to be buried in the Additions menu, but it’s now in the File menu. (QuarkXPress offers a similar feature in its QuarkPrint XTension.)
Here are some other noteworthy 6.0 features: the ability to turn objects into masks that can be used to crop images and text, improved handling of EPS graphics (you now get an alert if an EPS file contains a font you don’t have available), the ability to import RGB TIFF images and have PageMaker convert them to CMYK, and user-definable page grids.
Going Online
PageMaker 6.0 provides two new tools for publishing electronic documents. The Create Adobe PDF command allows you to save documents directly into Adobe’s Portable Document Format, and the HTML Author 1.0 plug-in allows you to export PageMaker documents as HTML-tagged text, the standard format for documents on the World Wide Web. HTML Author allows you to map each individual PageMaker style to a corresponding HTML tag so you can preserve overall formatting instructions when creating Web documents. Unfortunately, HTML Author is somewhat buggy and limited. For example, the filter inserts an empty line into paragraphs that break at the end of a page in PageMaker, and the Read Me file warns that you may get “unexpected results” if you type any new text after applying HTML styles. Also, you can’t create more than 50 links in a document.
The Last Word
PageMaker 6.0 is a substantial, solid, and intelligent upgrade — one that brings the program completely up-to-date and puts it on par, in my opinion, with QuarkXPress. Most of the new features are practical and powerful improvements that make it much easier to prepare documents for professional output.
Schorr, Joseph. (November 1995). Adobe PageMaker 6.0. Macworld. (pgs. 60-61).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
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2014-04-14 / 
2020-03-19 / 
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adobepagemaker60.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
