Page Maker 6.5
by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the June 1997 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter
Page Maker 4.0 has done a good job for me for the past several years, and in fact it is being used to print this paper. I tried PM5 just after it came out, and had a lot of problems, in fact half of the review was devoted to describing work-arounds to problems I had discovered, and by the time the review was printed, I had discovered another batch of problems, so severe that I dropped back to PM4, and the issue with the PM5 review was the only issue of the I/O Port ever printed on PM5. When PM6 came out I insisted on being allowed to redo the PM5 review with the latest version of PM5 in the same issue, and I found that many of the problems I had experienced earlier with PM5 had been fixed (although I still had problems importing my current PM4 newsletter file into PM5. It would import, after an hour or two of work, and I could save it, but when I then loaded it it would crash my system. PM6 had a lot of new problems, and it too was unable to import my PM4 file, either directly from the PM4 format, or from the PM5 format that the latest version of PM5 generated. So I stuck with PM4.
When PM6.5 came out I thought my prayers had been answered. Surely this would be like the latest version of PM5 just before PM6 had been released, i.e. all of the problems of PM6 would be fixed. I was disappointed to learn that PM6.5 would run only in Win95, but I felt I could live with that, but after spending about three hours trying to load PM6.5 and having it lock up every time, I was just about at the point of deleting it totally from my disk and burning all of the documentation and sailing the CD Rom off a cliff, when all of a sudden the setup program broke loose and started installing the software correctly. I feel it would be inaccurate to say that the program could read my mind, and know what I was planning to write in my review, but I have no other explanation for it.
PM6.5 not only installed correctly, but it was able to import my PM4 file directly, save it, and then load it again the next time I ran PM6.5. What a miracle!!! I am not too wild about the Panose Font Matching code; it wanted to assign Brush Script, Gill Sans, Switzerland, and Times New Roman all to courier, even though there were two Brush Script files, a couple of variations of Gill Sans, Helvetica (which is very like Switzerland) and Times (which is certainly like Times New Roman). This made me recall one of the problems from the first version of PM5, somehow its font conversion code was screwed up, and it assigned fonts to things like WingDings and other really wild fonts -- it turns out they were failing to load a pointer to their font table, and the work around I found on PM5 was to convert the font for the edit mode to some font other than default. I did not have to do that on PM6.5 -- I just typed in the real fonts to be used.
It is going to take a while before I will be in the position to actually publish the I/O Port in PM6.5. Since it runs only on Win95, and since the bios chip on my desktop machine is too old to support Win95, I must either upgrade its motherboard or come up with a way of switching my Laser Printer between the desktop and the luggable. But hopefully in a month or two I may be on PM6.5 for good. That should make it easier to subsequently publish the I/O Port on the TCS Web Pabe, because any graphics used in the PM6.5 files are converted automatically to GIF or JPEG format, and hypertext links are created to them. The program also apparently has the ability to reformat for Web use, reflowing text, resizing graphics, and repositioning objects for the new page dimensions. PM6.5 also has support for Adobe Acrobat 3.0.
It is going to take a while to get used to the new look and feel of PM6.5, which resembles Photoshop as much, if not more, than it resembles the old PageMaker, with tabbed palettes, etc. The old free-form layout capabilities are still there, but they have also introduced text and graphic frames, in an apparent attempt to lure over users of other DTP packages like Quark Express.
PageMaker 6.5 looks like a very good program, and I will be looking forward to seeing Adobe's program on the product at the next TCS General Meeting, 7:30 pm, on May 27.
Adobe Systems
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, CA 95110-2704
408-536-6000
408-536-6799 fax
http://www.adobe.com
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Tulsa Computer Society 05/14/97
Don Singleton, President
tcs@galstar.com