For nearly a year, Adobe PageMill 1.0 was the only page-creation tool to offer WYSIWYG Web-page editing, which allowed (in theory) Web authors to create pages without having to learn a speck of HTML. In practice, many of PageMill's capabilities were quirky and limited, and, what’s worse, it offered no way to edit bare HTML short of launching a word processor. Claris Home Page 1.0 recently leap-frogged PageMill’s features, but now Adobe hops back with PageMill 2.0.
The new version fixes most of the quirks and adds such sorely needed capabilities as search and replace, spell check, HTML source mode, and true WYSIWYG tables and frames. However, it is flawed mainly by a confusing interface.
Version 2.0 hews closely to the original’s appearance. There’s a toolbar, and a large button switches between browser-like preview for testing and WYSIWYG editing mode. PageMill now lets you switch to HTML source editing, and you’ll need it, because PageMill still doesn’t support less-common tags such as BLOCKQUOTE. However, Adobe has fixed version 1.0’s annoying habit of using <BR> tags where <P> tags were intended.
WYSIWYG editing mode gives you almost everything you could hope for—you can drag and drop page elements around the page, between pages, and between frames; drag GIF, JPEG, and PICT images directly onto a page. PICT files are automatically converted into GIF You can set an image to interlace or be transparent, or create client-side and server-side image maps.
Preview mode will display animated GIF images in motion; QuickTime movies, PDF files, and other plug-in-related files can be dragged from the Finder. PageMill's place holders allow you to insert CGI scripts and Java applets. Links can be created in a variety of ways, including by typing, by dragging a page icon from another page, or by dragging a link directly from your browser. The plethora of disparate linking methods is confusing, though, and PageMill doesn’t offer Claris Home Page’s handy pop-up menu of recently created URLs.
Tables are fully implemented. PageMill is the first page-creation tool to give nearly full WYSIWYG control over tables, almost completely without resorting to dialog boxes. Tables can be copied and pasted directly from Microsoft Excel, though PageMill won’t convert tab-delimited text. You can resize by dragging borders and, through toolbar buttons, can add, delete, merge, and split rows, columns, and cells. You can also color individual cells, and set the border and cell padding. You can set the entire table or individual cells to specific pixel or percentage widths, a boon for those of us who use tables for layout,
Frame creation is implemented nicely, offering a true WYSIWYG view of a frameset—something no similar application yet offers. Creating frames is as easy as Option-dragging the top or side of a page. Though we remain leery of the overuse of frames, PageMill makes them incredibly easy to create.
PageMill 2.0 has all the requisite appurtenances: a scrapbook, customizable background colors and patterns displayed live, a bare-bones spell checker, and a statistics box which estimates download times. Find and Replace works with any element, even images. You can create forms, but, as in most similar applications, only one per page. In a baby step toward a fully functioning preview mode, PageMill can switch to a browser to check links to remote URLs.
But using all of PageMill's features is confusing. There are far too many obscure methods of dragging, selecting, chcking, and moving; Option-dragging a table border does something different than shift-dragging; to select linked text you have to triple-click it; Shift-Return creates a <BR> tag; and so on. Rather than use dialog boxes for text and number entry, PageMill offers the oddly named Inspector, a floating box that alters its contents depending on what’s selected on the page. I had to resort to reading the manual (gasp!) to learn how to perform simple tasks such as setting an image’s transparency.
Among Web-page-creation tools, PageMill 2.0 takes the lead in flexibility and WYSIWYG features, especially in tables and frames creation. Despite its Byzantine interface, PageMill is powerful enough to earn its place as the Web application of choice. But keep your ears to the ground: Claris Home Page 2.0 is slated to appear soon.
Holmes, Joseph O. (January 1997). Adobe PageMill 2.0. MacAddict. (pg. 68).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
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adobe_pagemill_2.0_disk_1-4.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
