Throughout the 1990s there were only two choices for desktop publishing: Adobe PageMaker and QuarkXPress. Quark quickly established itself as the professional package, and Adobe finally upped the ante in 1999 by releasing InDesign... as a more worthy competitor for Quark. So what of our trusty PageMaker? At version 7, it's still a solid layout program and a viable solution for people who need to create an impressive, professional-looking design without hiring a professional designer.
The first step — installing PageMaker — is unfortunately the most annoying. PageMaker requires that you have some version of Adobe Type Manager installed on your Mac, as well as Acrobat Distiller 5 for creating PDF documents. The installer doesn’t check for these components, but alerts you that you may need them; fortunately, ATM Lite 4.6 and Distiller 5 are on the PageMaker disc, though you’ll need to install them manually. Adobe also includes a slew of professionally designed publication templates, which you must also drag manually to the hard drive. The templates, in turn, rely on 56 Type I fonts — yet another manual installation. Overall, the process required that we restart our Mac three times — once after installing PageMaker itself, again after Distiller, and again after ATM Lite — and took just under an hour.
Adobe has been making a concerted effort to unify its programs, in terms of both interface and file-format compatibility. PageMaker reaps the results of these efforts, and they’re a mixed blessing. On the plus side, PageMaker now directly imports Photoshop and Illustrator files, complete with full layer support. This means the image files (in your PageMaker document) update as you work on them in their respective applications — a godsend for designers tired of maintaining separate groups of in-progress images. Adobe’s patented palette approach to interface design also makes some operations easier, such as launching scripts (now contained in a palette similarto Photoshop’s Action palette) and choosing between multiple master pages. Other aspects of the interface overhaul don’t work quite so smoothly. Particularly puzzling is the Layers palette. Since you can already stack each element in a PageMaker layout above or below any other element, the added Layers functionality is wasted on most users.
PageMaker isn’t tough enough for the professional layout and design crowd, but it’s plenty for business and small-office users. The package includes over 300 professionally designed templates in both A4 and letter-size formats. Using templates and PageMaker’s new Data Merge function, it’s simple to crank out slick form letters, company directories, newsletters, and other documents without endlessly copying and pasting individual names, addresses, or other recurring data.
Adobe also provides 300 stock photos and mountains of clip art, giving you plenty of out-of-the-box fodder for flyers or corporate reports. Navigating this wealth of creative compost, however, is a bit trying. The Windows version has palettes for browsing through both the templates and the clip art, but the Mac version lacks these palettes. This forces users to dig through a massive PDF catalog to find the clip art they want (without so much as a keyword search!) and open templates one at a time to find the right look.
Adobe has been pushing the e-book format — the company's portable, platform independent, copy-protected answer to dead-tree books — for years now, and PageMaker finally gives us the tools to create e-books. You can also export your layouts to HTML for the Web, but many text and graphic adjustments (such as resizing, repositioning, changing fonts, and drawing boxes and polygons) get lost in translation, making HTML export useless for anything more complex than simple text documents...
A number of functions depend on utilities bundled with PageMaker, such as Acrobat Distiller for creating PDF files, Adobe Table for quickly generating complex table layouts and saving them as ready-to-place graphics, and the QXP Converter utility for bringing Quark documents into PageMaker. The utilities work well; we couldn't decipher the Quark converter’s file-naming convention..., but the converted pages themselves stayed remarkably true to the original layout. Here again, Mac users miss out on some functionality — Windows users can also convert Microsoft Publisher documents.
Our main beef with the Mac version of PageMaker is its lack of feature parity with the Windows version, particularly the absence of a template-preview palette. We were also hoping for a Carbonized version, though PageMaker does play well In Mac OS X’s Classic environment. Historically, PageMaker has always managed to strike a terrific balance between ease of use and layout control, and that’s one thing that hasn’t changed.
Pizor, Rich. (November 2001). PageMaker 7.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 58-59).
This is the last major version of PageMaker to be released. Adobe InDesign replaced PageMaker's place in Adobe Systems' lineup.
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
3800 / 
2016-03-28 / 
2017-05-12 / 
d97fe32620a69053b0f818eeed3c12f36aa4909f / 
/ 
Adobe_Pagemaker_7.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
