Page Layout Software for Windows or Mac

by Charlie Morris

I've been using PageMaker for years, and have produced thousands of documents with it. Although it has its faults, I've always found it powerful and easy to use. According to Adobe, PageMaker is aimed at the small business or the small publisher, while another Adobe product, InDesign, is aimed at the graphics professional, and competes with the popular page layout package Quark Xpress.
June 15, 2000

As longtime readers will know, The Web Developer's Journal began life (in 1991) as a print magazine called National Computer Tectonics, which was entirely laid out using PageMaker. WDJ trivia buffs will be intrigued to know that there was even a single print issue each of the Web Developer's Journal and Tapeless Studio, which we created in order to satisfy trademark requirements. Magazine/newsletter-type layouts are PageMaker's specialty.

I admit, I use PageMaker in some applications for which it is over-qualified. My letterhead, for example. I know I could do it just as easily in Word, or even within my contact manager or my email client for that matter, but I'm used to PageMaker, thank you.

What's the difference among the various types of graphic and publishing software, anyway? Can't they all do the same things? To a certain extent, yes, but each genre excels at its own part of the graphic scene. Vector-based graphic editors (Illustrator, Corel) let you build graphics using various drawing tools. They excel at creating line art, charts and such. Bitmap-based graphic editors (Paint, Photoshop, Corel PhotoPaint) let you work with photos and other graphic material, adjusting each pixel of data if you like. They excel at creating graphics using photos or other scanned artwork. Both types of editors have text capabilities, but they are limited, and tend to be more oriented toward creating special text effects than to handling large amounts of text.

If you want to do complex things with text, then a word processor is the tool to use. Advanced word processors like you-know-what allow you to do all kinds of text formatting, including columns, tables and charts, and they also let you include imported graphics. You can produce an entire magazine or newsletter in Word, if you like. When it comes to the heavy lifting of publishing however, and certainly when it comes to pre-press capabilities, a word processor will come up short, and that's where a page layout package such as PageMaker comes in.

A page layout package lets you take material created with any of the other types of program (text, graphics), and assemble it into a finished publication ready for the print shop (or the Web server).

What can a page layout program do that a word processor can't? One thing is that a page layout program lets you drag text and graphic elements around, and easily place them anywhere on a page. A word processor makes you handle text in a linear way. If you want to add white space, you must do so using tabs or indents, and line breaks of fixed length. With PageMaker, you can simply grab any text element, and place it where you like. You can think of it as letting you take several word-processor-type text files (each including tabs, indents, etc. if desired) and arrange them on a page however you like.

Another thing that word processors won't do is text threading. Blocks of text can be "threaded" together, which means that if you change the size of one block, the other threaded blocks change accordingly. In other words, say I have an article which starts on the left column of a page, and continues in the left column (or even on another page). If I decide to insert a graphic in the left column, and shorten the text column in order to do so, the text will "flow" into the next block of text. This makes it easy to lay out pages, and rearrange them in various ways, without having to worry about the text.

The text itself can be edited as a "story". The Story Editor is used to make changes to the text while leaving the formatting and placement intact. This makes it easy to update content, or even place completely new content into the same layout.

Page layout programs also provide pre-press features, for those who need to send output to a print shop or service bureau. PageMaker lets you make color separations, and also save a document as a Postscript file. Not all service bureaus have Photoshop, but they can all read Postscript. Giving them an all-inclusive Postscript file eliminates worries about fonts and other linked files.

One handy thing about PageMaker is that, like Photoshop, the same file can be read by either the Windows or Mac versions of the program. When dealing with graphic shops, the chances are high that Mac users will be involved, so it's nice not to have to deal with different versions of the same document.

In keeping with its user-friendly, church-newsletter positioning, PageMaker comes with a wealth of templates and sample files that can be used as starting points for magazines, newsletters, etc. There are also lots of stock illustrations and photos.

Designing for the Web

PageMaker was originally designed to produce print output, and that remains its strong suit. With version 6.0, HTML support was added, although it was pretty lame at first. In the latest version, I'm happy to report that the HTML exporting capabilities are pretty strong. If you're willing to take the time to tweak the settings, PM 6.5 can convert existing documents into perfectly good HTML pages. Some redesign will usually be called for, simply because HTML does not allow everything that DTP programs do (as we all know very well, alas).

To convert a PageMaker document to HTML, simply choose "Export to HTML" from the file menu. This will bring up a dialog box that lets you select which pages go to which HTML file - this is important, since a PageMaker document can contain multiple pages. There is also another dialog box that lets you set a variety of options for the conversion. You can map any of PageMaker's text styles to any appropriate HTML tag. By experimenting a little, and tweaking the options, you should be able to produce good HTML output.

I tested PageMaker's HTML abilities using a newsletter-type document. I opened the existing PageMaker file, then did an "Export to HTML", without making any changes. Other than screwing up the line breaks, PageMaker did an okay job, even automatically created .jpg versions of the original .tif graphics.

HTML tables are used to reproduce the column structure of a PageMaker document. Any time that this is done "automatically", it's bound to result in a rather convoluted table structure which is tough to edit. PageMaker uses the famous 1-pixel GIF trick to make tables line up in both browsers - it also inserts a handy comment tag telling you that this has been done.

This was a quick n dirty experiment, and if I tweaked my document a little, I could make the HTML version come out a lot better. For example, I should be using the Styles feature of PageMaker. This allows you to save a set of formatting choices (font, size, etc.) as a Style, for example, Heading, Body Text, Caption, etc. You can map each Style to a particular HTML tag.

Note that PageMaker is a page layout program, not a Web design tool. All it can do in the Web department is convert PageMaker documents to HTML. You can't include hyperlinks, scripts, forms, frames and so forth as you can in a WYSIWYG Web editor such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver. PageMaker can also export documents to Adobe Acrobat's popular PDF format.

Insect Life

PageMaker does have its problems. Like many Windows programs, it has problems handling fonts. If you use a particular font in a document, and that document is later opened on a system that does not have that font available, PageMaker will substitute another font, and will notify you of this fact whenever you open the document. That's all as should be, but the problem is that, even if you choose another font, and remove all references to the previous font from the document, PageMaker will still think that you want to use that font. Every time you open that document until the end of time (or until the bug is fixed), you'll have to click through a superfluous dialog listing the "missing fonts", even though those fonts are not used anywhere in the document. A similar situation exists with regard to linked pictures - PageMaker warns you that the linked picture can't be found, even though the links are actually working fine.

There's another little bug that involves CorelDraw. For some unknown reason, the fonts that come with CorelDraw (at least version 6.0) will prevent PageMaker from running. If you install those fonts, PageMaker will not start. At all. The only solution is to remove the fonts. This solution has one tiny problem: there's no way to know which are the fonts that Corel installed, unless you're one of those nerds who keeps careful track of such things. So, if you plan to install both PageMaker and Corel, Do Not let Corel install its fonts.