U of S | Mailing List Archive | alt-photo-process-l | Re: "Dick Stevens' book."

Re: "Dick Stevens' book."



On Thu, 22 Mar 2007, Erie Patsellis wrote:

I agree, Pagemaker isn't the same since Adobe bought Aldus (hopefully that statement isn't showing my age). I can remember using framemaker on a NEXTCube, now that's vintage, though it was stable as hell, and display postscript that worked properly.
The best defense is a good offense -- let the world salute creatures of such vintage who still have some, maybe even most, of their marbles.

I think I began with Pagemaker 2 (or possibly 4) when Quack was hardly a gleam in a duck's eye, and if you put your coffee cup down hard on the table, or ran the cursor into a margin, Pagemaker crashed. As "Analog Woman in Digital Hell" noted, "bad software drives out good." Tho I hyperbolize: I liked PM until version 7.

On the bright side, the Pagemaker word processor is excellent, does everything MSW 5.1 did, & right there in the file for laying out, no need to import. Framemaker, however, was a fraud... I understand that the new version *is* compatible with old PM files, but the early version wasn't, being Ingeniously Designed (abbreviated as "In Design) so that an existing Pagemaker file would be impossible to fit -- say a column would come out 2-1/2 lines too long, or a rule would go right through the line it was supposed to underscore...And In Design lacked the delicate controls to fix/adjust that (let alone fine tune/nuance rules, et al, as PM did). IMO it was deliberate, to orphan Pagemaker.

My current beef with Pagemaker is that they lied about its PDF-abilities. As noted, I was happy with PM until I needed PDFs for digital reprints.

J.