The challenge facing Aldus in creating PageMaker 4.0 was formidable: adequately meeting the competition — current and imminent — posed by Quark, Letraset, Frame, and Xerox (Ventura) while still satisfying the high expectations of an enormous installed user base, all hoping to see their particular wish lists incorporated.
When I first saw PageMaker 4.0, I had two questions: Was Aldus successful in achieving a broad balance of features, and was it able to fit the 75 new features within PageMaker’s existing framework without complicating the program for average users? The answers are both affirmative. There is something for everyone here. The new version may not address all the needs and wants of every particular group, but the range of improvements is impressive enough to please many — if not most.
PageMaker’s greatest asset has always been its accessibility. Version 4.0 is as easy to use as previous versions, since Aldus has retained the pasteboard metaphor. Its most significant advances are in word processing, typography, graphics, links management, long-document processing, color, and table processing.
WORDS AND TYPE PageMaker 4.0 comes with a word processor called Story Editor. This is the most significant advance in desktop page layout. Triple-clicking on any story within PageMaker opens that story in the built-in word processor. Story Editor is no Microsoft Word, and it doesn’t try to be. Nevertheless, it is quite powerful. The ability to read and edit a story in a word-processing view saves a lot of time, since editing in the layout view forces a full-screen redraw with every change. With Story Editor, you can edit away without slowing down. You can even display an article in Story Editor in the typeface and size of your choice, without affecting the story in the layout — so, for example, you can view your story in 14-point Stone Serif, even though
it’s laid out in 9-point Helvetica.
Story Editor can display the style name of each paragraph in a column on the left side as well as search for and replace text strings. It can also operate on formatting attributes (font, size, and style) in selected text, a single story, or all the stories in adocuinent. Its spelling checker lets you check your stories with multiple dictionaries and has been bolstered with simple grammar checking. PageMaker now lets you rotate unthreaded text blocks in 90-degree increments, and once rotated, the text can still be edited in Story Editor.
Quite a few improvements are geared toward the typographers in our midst. You can now specify type in, .1-point increments, from 4 to 650 points. Leading is specifiable in .1-point increments as well. PageMaker supports only proportional or top-of-caps leading; baseline leading is still not supported. If you are into condensed or expanded type, PageMaker 4.0 lets you do this in 1-percent increments from 5 to 250 percent.
Kerning is crucial in typography. PostScript permits four kinds of kerning: manual kerning, automatic (pairwise) kerning, letterspacing, and track kerning. PageMaker 4.0 lets you use any or all of these options. Manual kerning has been improved significantly and can be applied to a selected pair or a range of selected characters. It can also now be applied as a character attribute to spaces after a character. In PageMaker 3.0, manual kerning was not cumulative with automatic kerning. It now is.
Automatic kerning, based on kerning-pair values built into the FOND resource of the screen fonts, is still available. Letterspacing and word spacing have been improved in this version. Spacing in PageMaker 3.0 could be applied only to the whole story; you can now apply spacing settings to each paragraph.
PageMaker 4.0 introduces a fourth kind of kerning — track kerning. You can either choose to have no track kerning or select from one of the following five settings: very loose, loose, normal, tight, and very tight. Track kerning is a relative adjustment. Built-in tracking tables define good loose, normal, and tight spacing for different sizes of a particular font. By the way, track-kerning tables are stored in those ubiquitous AFM files that you’ve never known what to do with. In PageMaker, these tables are used to create “standardized adjustment curves.” Aldus has included track tables for the LaserWriter II's built-in fonts. Third-party utilities and track tables are available for other fonts.
The paragraph rule is a nifty feature. Previously, if your layout required a line (called a rule in publishing lingo) beneath a subhead, you had to draw it with the line tool. A slight editing change, and you had to move all the rules. No more. PageMaker’s latest incarnation lets you specify a paragraph rule of user-designated size, color, and width, below or above a paragraph.
PageMaker now has forced justification as one option. If it is selected, lines expand to the width of the block, so you can create some interesting effects with headlines. Hyphenation is now much more powerful. Three kinds of hyphenation — manual, dictionary, and algorithmic — are supported, and the number of consecutive hyphens is user-configurable. The Indent dialog box has also been improved. PageMaker can now highlight tight or loose lines at your request. Pressing Shift-Return in Microsoft Word creates a new line within the same paragraph; PageMaker lets you create similar lines with Command-Return. Widow and orphan control is available, but it’s somewhat limited.
PICTURES, LINKS, AND MORE Version 4.0 has significantly enhanced graphics handling. One of my favorite improvements is the Inline graphics feature, which lets you anchor a graphic to a specific piece of text. You can select an Inline graphic either as text or as an object. If it’s a text item, you can align it and apply many standard text-formatting features (leading, kerning, tabs, and so on); if you select it with the pointer tool — that is, as a graphic — you can make many of the usual graphic modifications. An Inline graphic is neither a text item nor an independent graphic, however, so you don’t always have the same flexibility you would with the genuine article.
One feature that will make a lot of people happy is PageMaker's ability to wrap text around a master item. The lack of this ability used to be my biggest gripe with the program.
With its Links feature, PageMaker has introduced a rudimentary work-group publishing capability. Links keeps track of imported documents. The Link Options dialog box gives you the choice of updating your improved document once the source document has been modified, so you can import a rough sketch of a graphic and flow your text around it while your Mac artist continues refining the image. I fell in love with the Links dialog box. It gives you a listing of ail the imported files, their type (TEXT, PICT, EPS, and so on), and the page they are currently on. Aldus has also created some icons to give you a quick overview of each file's status.
When it comes to long-document processing, PageMaker leaves its competitors in the dust. Version 4.0 lets you create a book list that specifics the different PageMaker documents that will comprise the book and the order in which they will be. It can then chain print or create a TOC (table of contents) or an index for all the documents in this book list. Of all the programs available for the Mac, PageMaker makes TOC and index generation the easiest.
PageMaker now incorporates PageMaker Color Extension — formerly a separate ($195) utility — and takes it one better. Version 4.0 lets you place 8- and 24-bit-color TIFF images, prims to color PostScript printers, offers Pantone color, and outputs separations with OPI comments. To create process-color separations, you still need a third-party utility such as Adobe Separator, but Aldus is soon due to come out with Aldus PrePrint, a dedicated separation utility that should bring a lot of high-end separation capability to the desktop.
A table-editing program, called Table Editor, now comes bundled with PageMaker. This program lets you export tab-delimited text or a PICT representation of your table. The PICT version can then be resized within PageMaker to fit your allotted space. Unfortunately, direct support of Word 4.0's tables isn't available.
PageMaker 4.0 also adds power to your pasting capabilities. If you paste with the Option key down, the item is pasted into the same position occupied on the original page. Option-paste also lets you place copies at a certain specified distance from the first Option-pasted item.
THE BOTTOM LINE PageMaker 4.0 is an exciting upgrade to a solid product. Current releases of QuarkXPress (version 3.0 was still in beta testing at this writing), Ready,Set,Go!, and DesignStudio offer some features that either are not implemented in PageMaker 4.0 or do not offer the same functionality or precision. Nevertheless, PageMaker 4.0's elegant user interface, long-document-processing capability, work-group functionality. and Story Editor are well ahead of the competition.
MacUser's troop of PageMaker testers encountered several quirks in version 4.0's auto-flow, minisave, and text-wrap functions. For example, the auto-flow function occasionally skipped an entire column, and the text wrap resulted in doubled-up characters in a narrow column. As auto-flowing and text wrap usually need to be touched up manually anyway, neither of these shortcomings is likely to be more than a minor nuisance. Still, we expect more from an industry standard. None of the bugs were reproducible, however, and the product performed reliably in typical production environments.
If features were all that counted, PageMaker 4.0 would probably lose an outright feature-list war. But in real-world situations, what counts isn't the size of ail application’s feature list but how productive it makes its users. On this score, PageMaker 4.0 comes out a clear winner. For example, it still can’t open multiple documents, but as most designers don't work simultaneously on multiple layouts and its PageMaker 4.0 lets you import material from other layouts, this is a “missing” feature that’s a nonissue for most designers. Another missing feature is the ability to lock or group elements of a template.
If features are what count with you, take a close look at QuarkXPress (version 3.0), DesignStudio, FrameMaker, and Ventura Publisher (Mac versions of the latter two should he available around the time you read this) before you make your decision. If, on the other hand, what counts is productivity, there's no reason to wait. PageMaker 4.0 is your best bet.
Quraishi, Jim. (September 1990). PageMaker. MacUser. (pgs. 46-47).
Aldus Corporation
Applications
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2020-09-13 / 
2024-02-17 / 
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PageMaker401.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
