The Windows version has palettes for browsing through both the templates and the clip art, but the Mac version lacks these palettes. Navigating this wealth of creative compost, however, is a bit trying. Using templates and PageMaker’s new Data Merge function, it’s simple to crank out slick form letters, company directories, newsletters, and other documents without endlessly copying and pasting individual names, addresses, or other recurring data.Īdobe also provides 300 stock photos and mountains of clip art, giving you plenty of out-of-the-box fodder for flyers or corporate reports. The package includes over 300 professionally designed templates in both A4 and letter-size formats. PageMaker isn’t tough enough for the professional layout and design crowd, but it’s plenty for business and small-office users. Since you can already stack each element in a PageMaker layout above or below any other element, the added Layers functionality is wasted on most users. Particularly puzzling is the Layers palette. Other aspects of the interface overhaul don’t work quite so smoothly. Adobe’s patented palette approach to interface design also makes some operations easier, such as launching scripts (now contained in a palette similarto Photoshop’s Action palette) and choosing between multiple master pages. This means the image files (in your PageMaker document) update as you work on them in their respective applications - a godsend for designers tired of maintaining separate groups of in-progress images. On the plus side, PageMaker now directly imports Photoshop and Illustrator files, complete with full layer support. PageMaker reaps the results of these efforts, and they’re a mixed blessing. Overall, the process required that we restart our Mac three times - once after installing PageMaker itself, again after Distiller, and again after ATM Lite - and took just under an hour.Īdobe has been making a concerted effort to unify its programs, in terms of both interface and file-format compatibility. The templates, in turn, rely on 56 Type I fonts - yet another manual installation. Adobe also includes a slew of professionally designed publication templates, which you must also drag manually to the hard drive. The installer doesn’t check for these components, but alerts you that you may need them fortunately, ATM Lite 4.6 and Distiller 5 are on the PageMaker disc, though you’ll need to install them manually. PageMaker requires that you have some version of Adobe Type Manager installed on your Mac, as well as Acrobat Distiller 5 for creating PDF documents. The first step - installing PageMaker - is unfortunately the most annoying. So what of our trusty PageMaker? At version 7, it's still a solid layout program and a viable solution for people who need to create an impressive, professional-looking design without hiring a professional designer. Quark quickly established itself as the professional package, and Adobe finally upped the ante in 1999 by releasing InDesign. Throughout the 1990s there were only two choices for desktop publishing: Adobe PageMaker and QuarkXPress.
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