Popular Page Layout and Desktop Publishing software
In the early days of the Macintosh, the very concept of Desktop Publishing was invented by Apple. The two primary tools were Pagemaker and the Apple LaserWriter. PageMaker was originally written by the Aldus corporation and was called "Aldus Pagemaker". Aldus was purchased by Adobe. It's draw was that it was easy enough for a rookie, yet powerful enough for a pro.
Up until 1999, this was Adobe's best page layout application and was very popular in the early 90's. It has a number of great features, the most important of which is ease of use. True pros used Quark Xpress instead. However Adobe is just releasing a new app called InDesign which is poised to compete with QuarkXpress for the top end of the desktop publishing market.
PageMaker's main features are:
- It's operation was "intuitive", you can usually "figure out" how to do something rather than have to memorize a lot of commands
- Ability to handle Postscript Fonts
- history palette which allows multiple undo's
- Abitily to handle vector graphics as well as bitmap graphics
- A WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) realtime display of your document
Pagemaker is useful for designing:
- brochures
- newsletters
- display ads
- business cards
- school yearbooks
It has the ability to print vector graphics such as Encapsulated Postscript or eps files. Such files are relatively small in size and infinitely scaleable with no degradation in image quality. This is not true of bitmap graphics. Such files are displayed on the screen as they will be printed or WYSIWYG. Vector graphics are also resolution independent. No matter what printer you output to, it will always have smooth lines.
Pagemaker is often used with other applications when doing desktop publishing such as:
Also see:
Source:
http://www.adobe.com/products/pagemaker/main.html
http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/software/pagemake.html
Last Updated 10.30.03