adam@fluke.UUCP (Adam Novick) (07/20/85)
Aldus released PageMaker four days ago (on July 15th). Those mail order houses that have been advertising it for the last several weeks should now be able to come up with the goods. You should also be able to find PageMaker at Apple dealers that serve the business community. I have been a beta test site for PageMaker for the last several months, and would like to offer my comments to the net. My perspective is that I have been working in technical publications for the last six years. My first book was done the hard way, with pencil, scissors and glue. Since then I have worked on a variety of mainframe wordprocessing and typesetting systems. In a nutshell, PageMaker is so slick, so versatile, and so easy to use, I want to shout about it. For those of you who don't know what it's about, PageMaker is an electronic page-makeup program. You can use it to pasteup text and graphics to create pages for slick, graphic-arts-quality publications, right on the Mac. It works with the ImageWriter, the LaserWriter, and (get this!) professional phototypesetting machines. The program requires a 512K Mac and an external drive. PageMaker directly accepts documents produced by MacWrite, MacDraw, MacPaint, and Word. It also accepts anything else you can get on the clipboard. (I haven't tried PageMaker with Word, but since Aldus has made good on all their other claims, I'm sure it works with Word, too.) Once documents are on a page, you can edit the text, stretch and crop the graphics, add other simple graphic elements, and move everything around until you are happy with the result. During the process, you can zoom in and out to see the pages at different magnifications. Among other features, text columns are "threaded" together so that when you lengthen or shorten a column, text automatically flows into or out of the other columns as required, even from other pages. The list of features goes on, but rather than repeat them here, let me refer you to Aldus' demo disk or to one of the recent reviews (see MacWorld, July 1985; Professional & Corporate Publishing, March 1985; or the Seybold Report on Publishing Systems, Volume 14, Number 9). Or better yet, look at some sample pages, like the PageMaker manual itself. It's phenomenal what you can do with a Mac and a LaserWriter. People are undoubtedly going to choke on the price ($495 list), especially when they compare it to the price of MacPublisher and Ready-Set-Go! ($99 and $125, respectively). But PageMaker has so many more capabilities it's really a question of comparing apples to oranges (no pun intended). The bottom line is that if you have a LaserWriter, you can't afford NOT to have PageMaker. One point that reviewers have generally failed to appreciate is the significance of PageMaker's use of PostScript. PostScript is a device-independent, page-description language which is rapidly becoming the industry standard. PostScript can describe just about anything you can think of putting on a page--from text to vector graphics to bit maps. Because it's device independent, the resolution of your carefully crafted page is limited only by the resolution of the output device. Although this doesn't work miracles for bit-mapped art (e.g., MacPaint, MacVision, and Thunderscan graphics), it means text and vector graphics can take full advantage of the LaserWriter's or a phototypesetter's capabilities. In practical terms, this means you can put together a newsletter using your ImageWriter, tweak the layout until it's right, and then--without changing a single byte--print it on a LaserWriter or a phototypesetter. Out come typeset pages, complete with all your text and graphics. (Can you imagine the crispness with which a phototypesetter would reproduce the vector graphics from your MacDraw document?) The first phototypesetters to be able to interpret PostScript--and thus be usable with PageMaker--will be the Linotronic 101 and 300 from Allied Linotype. (Allied is the new name for Mergenthaler, the prestigious, 100-year-old typesetting firm. In keeping with the times, Allied is calling their products "imagesetters" rather than "typesetters.") An Allied rep just told the Seattle Macintosh User's Group that the Linotronic 101 will be available in 150 days. After all this gushing I owe you some caveats: First, although the ImageWriter can print PageMaker documents, it really takes the LaserWriter (or a phototypesetter) to take advantage of PageMaker's capabilities. The slickest of layouts is going to look amateurish unless the text and art are crisp, and the crisper the better. In other words, the LaserWriter needs PageMaker, and PageMaker needs the LaserWriter. Fortunately for paupers like you and me, according to Aldus, businesses (such as computer stores?) will soon offer printing on the LaserWriter as a service: You hand them a disk and they hand you pretty pages. Presumably, someone will offer a similar service with the Linotronics. (So you want your own Linotronic 101, eh? Hey, go for it! They only cost $30,000. Actually, that's cheap compared to what similar systems cost only a couple of years ago.) Another important point is that PageMaker is really intended for documents 1 to 16 pages long--such as newsletters, menus, brochures, little instruction manuals, etc. These it can do with beautiful efficiency. PageMaker can also be used for longer publications, but the going definitely gets tougher. As I mentioned before, Aldus pasted up their manual using PageMaker (and it looks great), but as the manual itself implies, such tasks are no simple feat. (The manual suggests using a hard disk to make larger jobs a little easier.) For smaller publications, though, PageMaker really sings. As one reviewer said, "If you were to sit down and use the program, and did not see that you were using a Mac, you'd think you were using a $100,000 page make-up system." Drool, drool, drool. Adam Novick Supervisor, Technical Publications John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc Everett, WA Disclaimer: Aside from having volunteered to be a Beta test site and edit their manual in exchange for a copy of the final release (Jeez, I work cheap!), I have no connection with Aldus. -- Adam Novick John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., MS 232E PO Box C9090 Everett WA 98206 ihnp4!uw-beaver----\ decvax!microsof \ ucbvax!lbl-csam \ +====!fluke!adam sun / sb1!allegra / ssc-vax------------/ (206) 356-5238