Article-I.D.: tpvax.647
Posted: Fri Jul 19 17:25:18 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 26-Jul-85 00:11:26 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., Everett, WA
Lines: 134

Aldus released PageMaker four days ago (on July 15th). Those mail order
houses that have been advertising it for the last several weeks should now
be able to come up with the goods. You should also be able to find PageMaker
at Apple dealers that serve the business community.

I have been a beta test site for PageMaker for the last several months, and
would like to offer my comments to the net. My perspective is that I have
been working in technical publications for the last six years. My first book
was done the hard way, with pencil, scissors and glue. Since then I have
worked on a variety of mainframe wordprocessing and typesetting systems.

In a nutshell, PageMaker is so slick, so versatile, and so easy to use, I
want to shout about it. 

For those of you who don't know what it's about, PageMaker is an electronic
page-makeup program. You can use it to pasteup text and graphics to create
pages for slick, graphic-arts-quality publications, right on the Mac. It
works with the ImageWriter, the LaserWriter, and (get this!) professional
phototypesetting machines. The program requires a 512K Mac and an external
drive.

PageMaker directly accepts documents produced by MacWrite, MacDraw,
MacPaint, and Word. It also accepts anything else you can get on the
clipboard. (I haven't tried PageMaker with Word, but since Aldus has made good
on all their other claims, I'm sure it works with Word, too.)

Once documents are on a page, you can edit the text, stretch and crop the
graphics, add other simple graphic elements, and move everything around
until you are happy with the result. During the process, you can zoom in and
out to see the pages at different magnifications. Among other features, text
columns are "threaded" together so that when you lengthen or shorten a
column, text automatically flows into or out of the other columns as
required, even from other pages.

The list of features goes on, but rather than repeat them here, let me refer
you to Aldus' demo disk or to one of the recent reviews (see MacWorld, July
1985; Professional & Corporate Publishing, March 1985; or the Seybold Report
on Publishing Systems, Volume 14, Number 9). Or better yet, look at some
sample pages, like the PageMaker manual itself. It's phenomenal what you
can do with a Mac and a LaserWriter.

People are undoubtedly going to choke on the price ($495 list), especially
when they compare it to the price of MacPublisher and Ready-Set-Go! ($99 and
$125, respectively). But PageMaker has so many more capabilities it's really
a question of comparing apples to oranges (no pun intended). The bottom line
is that if you have a LaserWriter, you can't afford NOT to have PageMaker.

One point that reviewers have generally failed to appreciate is the
significance of PageMaker's use of PostScript. PostScript is a
device-independent, page-description language which is rapidly becoming the
industry standard. PostScript can describe just about anything you can think
of putting on a page--from text to vector graphics to bit maps. Because it's
device independent, the resolution of your carefully crafted page is limited
only by the resolution of the output device. Although this doesn't work
miracles for bit-mapped art (e.g., MacPaint, MacVision, and Thunderscan
graphics), it means text and vector graphics can take full advantage of the
LaserWriter's or a phototypesetter's capabilities.

In practical terms, this means you can put together a newsletter using your
ImageWriter, tweak the layout until it's right, and then--without changing a
single byte--print it on a LaserWriter or a phototypesetter. Out come
typeset pages, complete with all your text and graphics. (Can you imagine the
crispness with which a phototypesetter would reproduce the vector graphics
from your MacDraw document?)

The first phototypesetters to be able to interpret PostScript--and thus be
usable with PageMaker--will be the Linotronic 101 and 300 from Allied
Linotype. (Allied is the new name for Mergenthaler, the prestigious,
100-year-old typesetting firm. In keeping with the times, Allied is calling
their products "imagesetters" rather than "typesetters.") An Allied rep just
told the Seattle Macintosh User's Group that the Linotronic 101 will be
available in 150 days.

After all this gushing I owe you some caveats:

First, although the ImageWriter can print PageMaker documents, it really
takes the LaserWriter (or a phototypesetter) to take advantage of
PageMaker's capabilities. The slickest of layouts is going to look
amateurish unless the text and art are crisp, and the crisper the better. In
other words, the LaserWriter needs PageMaker, and PageMaker needs the
LaserWriter.

Fortunately for paupers like you and me, according to Aldus, businesses
(such as computer stores?) will soon offer printing on the LaserWriter as a
service: You hand them a disk and they hand you pretty pages. Presumably,
someone will offer a similar service with the Linotronics. 

(So you want your own Linotronic 101, eh? Hey, go for it! They only cost
$30,000. Actually, that's cheap compared to what similar systems cost only
a couple of years ago.)

Another important point is that PageMaker is really intended for documents 1
to 16 pages long--such as newsletters, menus, brochures, little instruction
manuals, etc. These it can do with beautiful efficiency. 

PageMaker can also be used for longer publications, but the going definitely
gets tougher. As I mentioned before, Aldus pasted up their manual using
PageMaker (and it looks great), but as the manual itself implies, such tasks
are no simple feat. (The manual suggests using a hard disk to make larger
jobs a little easier.)

For smaller publications, though, PageMaker really sings. As one reviewer
said, "If you were to sit down and use the program, and did not see that you
were using a Mac, you'd think you were using a $100,000 page make-up
system."

Drool, drool, drool. 


Adam Novick
Supervisor, Technical Publications
John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc
Everett, WA


Disclaimer: Aside from having volunteered to be a Beta test site and edit
their manual in exchange for a copy of the final release (Jeez, I work
cheap!), I have no connection with Aldus.


-- 
Adam Novick
John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., MS 232E
PO Box C9090 Everett WA 98206

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