Extensis PageTools is a plugin that enhances Aldus PageMaker 5.0 (or later) with 10 additions that make PageMaker work faster, easier and more efficiently.
Over a year ago, Aldus added Additions to PageMaker 5.0, promising the kind of program extensibility that QuarkXPress owners have long had with XTensions. PageTools shows the real potential of Additions.
PageTools is a collection of several utilities. These tools were designed to work together, and that’s one of the prime benefits PageTools offers.
PageTools installs a button bar at the top of your screen that is decidedly un-PageMaker-like. PageTools gives PageMaker the feel of Microsoft Word. It took me a while to figure out PageTools’ icon scheme; if the name of the tool would pop up whenever you passed the mouse over the icon, as in Word 6.0, you wouldn’t have to memorize the icons’ meanings.
The series of icons at the left (plus, strangely, two at the far right) of the button bar take existing PageMaker features (line weight, fill type, stacking order, grouping, item guides, page insertion, and text sizing) and provide button-bar access. The series at the right all have a blue rectangle to identify them as PageTools features. The ten icons correspond to the ten features PageTools offers. (You can also access the Additions via the Aldus Additions submenu of the Utilities menu.)
My favorites are PagePrinter, PagePreview, PageColors, PageRulers, PageThumb, PageGuides, PageAlign, PageMover, and PageBar Editor. That’s nine of the ten — a high hit ratio.
PagePrinter lets you control printing even more than PageMaker’s superb print dialog boxes do: you can print all changed pages in a document. What a great idea!
PagePreview adds to the Open dialog box, so you can preview a PageMaker document before you open it. QuarkXPress has had this for about a year, but PagePreview lets you preview any page of a document, not just the first page.
PageColors lets you search and replace objects’ colors. Now you can change all boxes with a red border to azure blue.
PageRulers creates floating rulers (you can fill your screen with them if you’re not careful), which greatly aid the positioning and layout of elements.
PageThumb lets you see any page in a preview window. QuarkXPress’s Thumbnail view is always a favorite option of mine because I can quickly see what is on any page before moving to it. Now PageMaker offers the same function.
PageGuides lets you put guidelines with elements, so you can align elements with, say, a graphic’s corner or a center point. The Addition gives you full control over where you want guides to appear.
PageAlign lets you select objects and align them against each other or evenly distribute them over a certain area of the page. This old-time QuarkXPress feature should have been in PageMaker years ago.
PageMover moves selected elements to other pages (including master pages) or the pasteboard. It’s a deceptively powerful Addition, since you can move objects without leaving your current page.
PageZoom — which lets you zoom in on an area of your page — is clunky to use and not much of an improvement over just changing your page view.
Overall, I have only a few quibbles. It’s easy to add buttons via the PageBar Editor — perhaps too easy. You can unwittingly create a blank button that does nothing. I’d also prefer being able to choose the order of buttons in the button bar so I could, for example, group the guide-oriented ones together. I also wish the dialog boxes used a larger, bolder typeface. They’re hard to read on my 16inch monitor. These are minor complaints, and the paucity of them shows just how well designed PageTools is.
The Last Word
As with any utility package, the real value depends on whether your work benefits from what the utilities offer. PageTools offers several utilities that will benefit many people. PageAlign, PagePrinter, and PageRulers alone are worth the price; the others are frosting on the cake. PageTools is packed with utility.
Gruman, Galen. (December 1994). PageTools 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 67).
Extensis PageTools 1.0
Extensis Corporation
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
6 / 
2017-08-24 / 
2017-08-24 / 
f6dcccdbbc2d0c78fa604a18463e0e8a30d452b0 / 
/ 
PageTools_1.0_Installer.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
