Product Reviews

After the launch of InDesign, Adobe signalled the termination of its previous page layout flagship, PageMaker. The company didn't cut PageMaker dead but released a final edition, known as 6.5 Classic, and let it linger as long as users wanted it to. So it comes as a surprise to find Adobe revisiting the program that defined desktop publishing. Faithful users should welcome the update; new users may wonder what the fuss is all about.

With the previous release of PageMaker, Adobe redefined its target buyer as someone working in an office and needing professional hands-on page layout tools, but without the usual emphasis on graphic design. With version 7.0, there wasn't a great deal Adobe could do to challenge the likes of QuarkXPress or InDesign without completely reworking the product, so instead it's presented as a functional update. The program looks and feels almost exactly like version 6.5, but with compatibility fixes to ease the effect of ageing.

For those new to PageMaker, it's a general purpose page layout package with some surprisingly practical features that you won't find in the DTP market leaders. For a start, it's relatively undemanding in terms of Mac processing power and memory and loads very quickly.

Easy does it

As well as being able to work with text directly on the page, you can edit it within a word processor-style Story Editor window. Do you need to lay out an instantly adjustable table of rows and columns? Fire up PageMaker's Table Editor and away you go. And until InDesign came along, PageMaker's Expert Kerning and Tracking features were the best in DTP typography and still leave QuarkXPress looking sorry for itself.

PageMaker is also rather nifty at building tables of contents and provides a fairly good indexing facility. Even better, indexes and page links can be exported to PDF remarkably neatly. Having built the

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links in your PageMaker document, they're converted to PDF links automatically when exported. In other words, you can jump straight from page layout to a fully indexed and bookmarked PDF in one step.

This particular capability has been much improved in PageMaker 7.0. The program comes with a copy of Acrobat Distiller 5.0 and you can tap into the complete Distiller 5.0 feature set from PageMaker's PDF Options window. This includes 128-bit password encryption and PDF 1.4 compatibility, as well as the ability to embed PDF Tags.

These tags allow text to wrap to the viewing window size and are essential for generating e-books based on Acrobat Reader for portable devices. As a result, PageMaker 7.0 is now the most powerful creator of PDF documents on the market.

Another great enhancement is Data Merge, a plug-in that simplifies the variable personalisation of documents based on database information. Unfortunately, this didn't work in our pre-release copy of PageMaker 7.0: on every attempt, it would pop up a warning that one of the data field names was over 256 characters long (it wasn't) and go no further. Such problems are common in pre-release software, but it's a pity we couldn't test this new feature.

Otherwise, the program simply sports a bunch of updates to support external applications. You can now place native Photoshop 5 and 6 images on the page, as well as Illustrator 9.0 graphics, PostScript 3 EPS files and, of course, version 1.4 PDFs. You can import word processor documents in RTF format more smoothly, while support for Word 2000 and 2001 has been added. The QuarkXPress converter now supports XPress 4 documents. And, as before, you get a heap of page layout templates to play with, too.

Buying time

As an upgrade, PageMaker 7.0 makes a lot of sense. It protects your current investment in training and software without forcing you to upgrade all your hardware. Adobe rates the program as Mac OS X Classic Mode compatible.

But for first-time buyers, the full product price seems expensive, at least on the basis of this pre-release version. Sure, XPress, InDesign and FrameMaker all cost more than PageMaker, but it's still not the affordable business DTP solution the Mac platform so desperately needs. Unless the PDF features are your reason for buying, you may as well spend £400 on Deneba Canvas, CorelDraw or FreeHand, all of which provide good multipage DTP functionality and professional graphics tools to boot.