info-mac@uw-beaver (09/12/85)
From: mtu!russell@Glacier (Russell Reid) I recently bought a copy of PageMaker, from Aldus Corporation, 610 First Ave. Suite 400, Seattle, WA 98104. PageMaker is a publications layout program, designed to do page layout for a publication after you have written the articles with MacWrite or Word and drawn the graphics with MacDraw, MacPaint, or the like. (it apparently accepts any graphics in PICT format, though I did not test it with anything except MacDraw.) I read the whole manual before attempting anything of substance, then used it to lay out first a very simple newsletter, and then a somewhat more complicated four-page newsletter with three columns, some MacDrawings, headers, page numbers, and a big title bar. PageMaker comes with two disks, one with system files and one with PageMaker, called respectively system and master. Its copy-protection scheme demands that you insert the original master disk once per bootup. It will not accept a bit copy made with Copy II Mac 4.0 as a master disk. If you do as they ask and tear a card from the manual and mail it in, Aldus sends you a backup copy of the master disk. I frequently carry my PageMaker disk to a remote site which has a LaserWriter printer, so I'm nervous about not being able to make backups. Overzealous copy protection. To use PageMaker you first set basics like paper orientation and margins, then set up one (or two if left and right pages differ) master page. The master page presets printing and nonprinting items you want on every page, like running heads, page numbers (printing) and column guides (nonprinting.) On any given page, you can override the master page's dictum by "hiding" master page items. You then paste things into the publication using the "place" command: when you choose place from a menu, a list of possible text and graphics items appears. You select one, and an icon appears showing where the top left corner of the item is. You put it where you want it and click, and Pagemaker flows it onto the page, between the column guides if you selected text. Text keeps flowing until it runs into something else, either another article or picture or the bottom of the page. The end of an article has a tab with a "+" if the entire article didn't fit, and a "#" if it did. If there's a "+", you point at it and click, and then go somewhere else and click to flow the rest of the text into place. After things are in place you can drag them around to your liking. You can edit text and add new text on the page, though the editing sometimes works awkwardly (as when you are editing the first part of an article on page 1 and the editing affects the part on page 3). If you have an article in many pieces, a given piece will have a + sign at both top and bottom if it is continued in both directions. Supposedly if you pull on a plus sign you can cover or uncover lines from the article, and they simultaneously appear/ disappear in other parts. It doesn't always work like that, though, and I am unable so far to tell when it does and when it does not. PageMaker has several useful MacDraw-like tools: you can draw lines, boxes, and circles with various pen and fill patterns, it has rulers, something like a grid system, and the ability to move one object behind another. You can choose size from larger-than-actual size down to fit-in-window. PageMaker is basically very flexible, and quite easy to learn. It is fun to use. PageMaker also has a number of drawbacks, some of them serious. I'll list them in the order they occur to me. First, and very serious in my judgement, is that PageMaker and MacDraw do not get along well at all. If you are going to publish something on the LaserWriter, you want to use MacDraw instead of MacPaint, so the LaserWriter can work its magic. All the graphics I used with PageMaker were MacDrawings. The problems are several: first, a MacDrawing of any complexity slows Mac- and PageMaker down to uselessness. You mustn't paste it in until you're largely finished mucking with a given page. Of course, complicated MacDrawings also tend to slow MacDraw into uselessness. Sigh. PageMaker is worse, however, largely because it often re-draws the picture completely unnecessarily. When you tell it to print, it puts up a dialog box, you click OK. Then it carefully re-draws the entire page before starting to print. If that takes 15 seconds or so, it starts to irritate you. Second, PageMaker simply blows up and will not print a moderately complicated MacDrawing. In a four-page newsletter, I had several MacDrawings. One was an outline map of the Great Lakes States, with about 10 cities drawn. (No roads or anything fancy.) It was all made of smoothed polygons. PageMaker could not print it (stack overflow somewhere in the PostScript code sent to the LaserWriter) but MacDraw could print it fine. So I cut and pasted in the old-fashioned way. (So who needs PageMaker then?...) Another MacDrawing it wouldn't print was actually entirely text: about 35 separate captions arranged in a box in a way that suited me. Again, MacDraw printed it OK, and the PageMaker page printed OK when I deleted the offending MacDrawing. Get out the scissors and glue. Third, and more surprising and insidious, is that PageMaker does a very much worse job of printing the same MacDrawing (on the LaserWriter; I didn't test any other printer.) I drew an outline of a skier with polygons, filled it with black, and pasted it into my PageMaker banner header. The skiers came out much thicker and cruder than the MacDrawings. To double-check I cut them back out of PageMaker, pasted them into MacDraw, then printed with no modification. The MacDrawings looked just fine. Ski poles were thin and elegant in MacDraw, thick and clumsy in PageMaker. Yukk, more scissors and glue. (The whole image, not just the poles, was thick and clumsy.) As best I can figure, PageMaker drew the polygon boundaries with too thick a line. So much for PageMaker/MacDraw compatibility. When ThunderScan comes out with their LaserWriter compatible software, I sincerely hope to be able to paste ThunderScan images into PageMaker. If not, I surely will use old-fashioned scissors and glue, and complain a lot. Right now, ThunderScans are too crude to be used directly. PageMaker seems to work pretty well with both Word and MacWrite. I had wome weird translation problems with a lot of special symbols, though: I used "...", apostrophe, and printers em-dash in Times Roman font. They looked OK on the screen in PageMaker, but came out in some (!!??!) printings as U's, Q's, and the like. I gave up on figuring it out and took them out of the text, replacing with old-fashioned 's and double-hyphens and such. My best guess, by the way as to the cause of all of these troubles, MacDraw and others, is the weird custom Aldus version of the Laser Prep that you must use with PageMaker. If you are printing at a remote site as I was, you learn more than you want to know about Aldus Prep, which is the set of PostScript procedure definitions that Aldus sends to the LaserWriter before shippint its PostScript code. Aldus's prep file, which they call Aldus Prep, is completely different from Apple's Laser Prep, and looks very ill-conceived both to my eye and to some others who know a lot more PostScript. To print at a remote site, as with other applications, you tell PageMaker to print on the LaserWriter you wish you had, then hold command-f down to put PostScript into a file for shipping to a PostScript printer. When you do that Aldus first puts its prep file into "PostScript1" and then puts in the PostScript for your document, unlike other applications which do not put in the prep file. The prep file is very large indeed, and takes a long time (20 minutes or so) to upload every time you ship a version to the LaserWriter. It turns out there's a way to avoid this, but it isn't in the Aldus manual: command-option-f will print the file without the laser prep. Command-f rapidly followed by command-d will print the file with prep file AND code to install the Aldus header in your LaserWriter, where it will remain until you reboot the LaserWriter. (Thanx and a tip of the hat to my PostScript guru....) That's about all I know about PageMaker, save a few oddball quirks in using the built-in text editor. When I copied PageMaker to my hard disk, the icon came out with DEMO stamped over it. Huh??? On balance, I think PageMaker is way too expensive ($495 !!!!), is too zealously copy-protected, and damn well ought to work with MacDraw. Any program that charges $500 should work a lot better than this one does. (My publication ended up looking good, but kudos go to the LaserWriter.) The copy-protection irritates me, but I figure I can count on Copy II Mac to beat it next version out. If they had used Apple's LaserPrep they would have had a lot fewer problems.... I have nothing whatsoever to gain or lose from my opinions about PageMaker, unless they remember my name and won't send me updates.... Russell Reid Michigan Technological University -------