For Position Only: Long Live PageMaker — or Not

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When I read the other day that Adobe was upgrading PageMaker to version 7.0, I didn’t have one of my two usual reactions to such news. Normally I’d either shrug it off as business-as-usual or I’d mutter, “About time. We’ve all been waiting.” (This is why I like working alone at home, so people don’t hear me talking to myself.)

But when I read about the PageMaker upgrade, I surprised myself by thinking, “Oh, isn’t that sweet.” That was the yin side of me, which holds affection for the program on which I learned desktop publishing back in the early ’90s. Then my yang side kicked in. “What’s Adobe thinking anyway? Is it planning to have InDesign take over the world or not? How on earth does it expect to do that if it has not one, not two, but three page layout tools?” (FrameMaker completes the trifecta.)

Then I got to thinking about how the page layout market has evolved over the years, how so much has changed and yet so much has remained the same, and whether or not PageMaker still even have a role to play in this performance?

DTP 101
Actually, I started down the road toward digital publishing back in the mid-1980s, when I typeset my college weekly on a Compugraphic MCS 8400. I’d pull long galleys out of the film processor and hang them up to dry, and then input copy editing changes marked in blue highlighter. I became intuitive about line breaks, which I couldn’t see accurately on my little 10-inch monitor.

Little did I know it then, squirreled away pulling all-nighters every Wednesday to prepare our flats, but Apple was putting the finishing touches on the first color Macintosh, PostScript was brewing in Palo Alto, and programs such as Aldus PageMaker, QuarkXPress, and Ventura Publisher were poised to change the way we produce publications.

By the time I got to “PC/Computing” magazine as a copy editor in 1991, Ventura was already an also-ran, and QuarkXPress and PageMaker were duking it out for the growing page-layout market. I went to work every day and sat down at my grayscale Radius monitor and booted up PageMaker on my Quadra. I marveled at WYSIWYG design, dove in and out of Story Editor like a dolphin riding the waves, and tweaked window shades with aplomb.

At that time, the managing editor of “PC/C” (now “Smart Business“) was engaged in a losing battle with the art director to switch from PageMaker for the Mac to QuarkXPress for Windows. Every publication I’ve worked for since has used QuarkXPress (for Mac, not Windows), and over time I’ve come to dismiss other contenders in this field. I’ve clucked to myself as Adobe has upgraded PageMaker over the years, thinking it’s fighting a losing battle but respecting the machinations of a free-market economy where healthy competition drives innovation. Still, some time ago I came to associate PageMaker with church newsletters (perhaps because for most of the last decade, the church where my father-in-law ministered used it on a PC to produce them), and when the last version came out two years ago — 6.5 Plus (isn’t the italicized “Plus” quaint?) — and the hype began to swirl around the “Quark-killer” InDesign, I thought for sure that PageMaker would be doomed for a fate of supported-but-not-actively-marketed.

Keeping up with the Times (Roman?)
But Adobe swears there are three distinct page-design markets, one for each of its applications: technical document publishing (aka “corporate publishing”) with FrameMaker; business and SoHo publishing with PageMaker; and professional publishing with InDesign. I do agree that technical document publishing is its own beast. I also believe that Adobe has to upgrade and beef-up PageMaker unless it wants to lose customers to Microsoft. But I think it’s slicing the pie too thin to say that the needs of business users and graphic designers are so different that they require different page layout tools.

Both Quark and Adobe have rightly plotted the course for all of our futures, and it involves being able to publish anywhere, anytime, to any medium. That means support for XML and PDF for easy data import, export, and exchange; integration with databases and easy file sharing and content management; and systematic and collaborative content creation that minimizes redundant steps in a workflow. You can bet that the forthcoming InDesign 2.0 and QuarkXPress 5.0 will both make tremendous strides down this road.

But the fact is, Adobe could easily retire PageMaker and offer a tantalizing promotion to convert those customers to InDesign, or to a “lite” version of InDesign if it wants to maintain the distinction between professional and prosumer markets a la Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. This would not only give InDesign a tremendous boost in market penetration but would also show Adobe’s faith in and commitment to the product. In fact, I assert that keeping PageMaker alive undermines the fledgling InDesign’s viability. It’s like saying this next-generation publishing tool isn’t ready go out on its own; the parent has to stand at the edge of the playground to make sure its child plays well with others and then intervene when someone throws sand. What does that say about InDesign, much less about Adobe’s vision of the future?

It says that even Adobe thinks InDesign and the whole network-publishing vision is not ready for prime time. Hey, I’ve used InDesign 1.5 and I know it leaves much to be desired, but what incentive do I have to stick with it through its growing pains when QuarkXPress works so much better, and PageMaker is available as a backup? (Forget about Microsoft Publisher. I’ve never touched it, and I doubt its users would convert to XPress, PageMaker, or InDesign. As the Seybold editors so adroitly noted in The Bulletin recently, Publisher is essentially free in Office, and it’s pretty hard to compete with that — much to service providers’ chagrin.)

Over the last 10 years both page layout applications and users have matured, so the truth is that designers and publishers have little tolerance for immature products. At the same time, if there’s one lesson we’ve all learned it’s that we have to be willing to try new tools and technologies if we want to keep benefiting from the efficiencies of digital publishing and serve the world’s ever-changing publishing needs. As sad is it is true, many products go through a life cycle that comes to natural conclusion when the technological landscape changes. I hate to think of such a ground-breaking product as PageMaker hanging around hoping for curtain calls when it has the opportunity to leave the stage with grace and dignity, to make room for up-and-coming stars.

 

  • anonymous says:

    With it’s own little scripting language, PageMaker has to go. There is much broader support for QuarkXPress or InDesign.

  • anonymous says:

    Anita mentions that she harkens back to the day when she wrote her school newsletter on an old MAC. Well, I harken back to just a few weeks ago when we finaled our Yearbook in High School, also using an old Macintosh. We have 17 computers that support Pagemaker 6.5, a feet in of itself considering the school board is fairly tight with cash. The point is, Jostens Publishing Company (jostens.com) publishes thousands of yearbooks every year and all of them use some form of Pagemaker. The market for Pagemaker is quite large in such academic worlds. Personally, I wish it would die — but it won’t for a long time because of that fact.

  • anonymous says:

    I too was surprised by the release of PageMaker 7.0, but I think it’s pretty evident that despite what Adobe says about serving three distinct markets with three page layout programs, the long-term plan is to kill off PageMaker in favor of InDesign. I would guess that market forces have delayed the inevitable. That InDesign, though I find it to be a superior program, is killing off neither XPress, nor it’s scion, PageMaker. Adobe is probably making more money from PageMaker sales than InDesign sales and can’t afford to ignore this market, thus the upgrade to 7.0. From this standpoint the upgrade makes sense. Obviously, InDesign 2.0 will have to prove itself worthy not just as a superior product from a feature point of view, but also in the marketplace.

  • anonymous says:

    PM7 points that Adobe has a wrong DTP market vision. Three publishing applications for a market which must grow over Quark’s one is simply to much optimistic. Best is to strenght InDesign with long-document features and better performance. Adobe could let complex features as conditional text to FrameMaker, but composition and indexes are necessary to ID.
    To use InDesign is as easy as to use PageMaker. The big difference is the performance (ID is VERY slow even in updated machines). So, we don’t need a PM7, we need an ID 2.0. The new version does not help professional users whose have been let alone after 1996, when PM6.5 arrived. These people migrated to Quark or ID and a limited-feature 7.0 version will not change this.

  • anonymous says:

    Having been around this biz for a very long time, it seems obvious why Adobe would upgrade PageMaker: its customers want it, otherwise it wouldn’t be a good business decision to spend the money to upgrade it.

    Although many are rooting for InDesign, if nothing else to challenge <hated> Q’s position, why does it have to be either InDesign or PageMaker…?

    Clearly, there is room in the market for both Q & PageMaker…if what Adobe says is true about targeting prof. publishers such as us, why would PageMaker need to go away? Aren’t Q’s customers who InDesign is after?

    While we quibble about how many types of publishers there are and what products we/they need and which ones are better or worse, Adobe & Q are continue to sell & upgrade all of their products for good business reasons.

    Maybe some PageMaker customers will adopt InDesign at some point, but if you read Adobe’s marketing…it’s the Q customers that they really want for InDesign.

    PageMaker already has lots of customers I imagine and will likely continue to regardless of what happens with InDesign.

  • anonymous says:

    Hmm, Adobe is a publicly traded company. As such, its managers are required to turn a profit. If Adobe fails to turn a profit, its stock price will fall. If the company often fails in this regard, then Adobe’s Board of Directors will feel compelled to replace its top–level managers with individuals who will implement policies that promise a return to profitability.

    If there is a demand for a product such as Pagemaker, which is to say, if there is an effective market for this product, then prudent mangers will supply such a product if they want to insure the profitability of their company and if they can do so in a cost–effective manner. Adobe is a profitable company and appears poised to remain so. Producing a Pagemaker 7 upgrade appears consistent with this profit–orientated approach to business management if one assumes there is a market for this product. Is there a market for this upgrade? Well, there are millions of Pagemaker owners who have not migrated to Quark, InDesign, Ventura or MS Publisher. They really may want to continue to use Pagemaker while also upgrading to Windows 2000, Windows XP and OS X. Heck, they may even be serious designers! Whether they are ‘serious’ designers or not, they do compose a market. And Adobe’s Pagemaker upgrade meets the demand of this market. Supplying a Pagemaker upgrade is thus a rational economic act. Adobe shareholders ought to be pleased!

    Notice how I analyzed Adobe’s Pagemaker upgrade without recourse to paranoid ideation and dismissive references to software and operating systems. I even treated Adobe’s senior managers as rational actors. I must be out of my mind!

  • anonymous says:

    I both agree and disagree with this article. I disagree that pagemaker is only for business users. There are MANY of us who are designers who started in PM and are now in our own businesses and still using it. In fact, PM can do things (like page imposition) that Quark cannot without a pricey add-on. Adobe has ignored this user base in favor of pursuing the Quark users–a big mistake. I do agree that they should be focusing on ID 2.0, but they should be enticing their existing base of PM users through $$ incentives and an easy transition of PM legacy files to ID 2.0

  • pixeltech says:

    I enjoyed this article and my reaction to hearing that PM7 was on the way left me similarly perplexed. I disagree with Anita’s assertion that “designers and publishers have little tolerance for immature products” in reference to InDesign. I’ve been using InDesign since well before it was released, and in my experience it is already a mature product. I find it does everything I want it to do better than QuarkXPress, and it has far fewer “gotchas” (all those little bugs and incompatibilities that take forever to fix). I do see it growing more, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s ready for Prime Time NOW. What I see is fear of change, and hesitation to wade into unfamiliar territory. More practically, companies don’t want to spend the money or take the time to train their people in a new program, even if it’s a lot like programs they already use, even if the new program is superior. I think that’s a shame, but I understand it. A new PageMaker is a lot less intimidating than an entirely new page layout program altogether. I’m just afrain Adobe is clouding the market too much. I want InDesign to succeed big. The longer I work with it, the less patient I am with QuarkXPress and its endless “gotchas.” I share Anita’s assertion that PageMaker ought “to leave the stage with grace and dignity, to make room for up-and-coming stars.” Thanks for the thoughtful piece.

  • anonymous says:

    The recent announcement by Adobe for PageMaker 7.0 is a very welcome development. It may surprise your columnist, but there is a large and active community of graphic arts professionals who use PageMaker as their primary page layout tool.

    I have been a freelance book designer for the past several years. During this time, I’ve met many other book designers. A substantial majority of these book designers use PageMaker as their primary tool for book design. PageMaker has superior features for longer documents (books). Quark doesn’t have these tools (at least, not without spending Xtra $$ for Xtras). Framemaker is also a good program for book design, but is neither easy nor pleasant to use.

    The update that Adobe has announced is not exactly a major rewrite or extensive feature expansion of the product. Mostly, it reflects the changes to the operating systems (Mac OS 9, Windows Me) and (hopefully) bug removal.

    Adobe has positioned PageMaker as a ‘business’ product with a somewhat lower price than Quark, InDesign, or Framemaker. This is classic marketing–to slice up a market into segments. It also will continue generating revenues for Adobe at a modest development cost. It remains to be seen what the success this strategy will have against the Microsoft Office/MSPublisher competition. I know that when beginning publishers ask me about software, that I suggest PageMaker over MS-Publisher (which isn’t well supported by book printers).

    Even though InDesign features the best typography since the dedicated typesetting systems in use before the ‘desktop’ era, it is not yet a mature product and is lacking a number of features of particular usefulness to book designers that are standard in PageMaker. I look forward to ID version 2. If rumors are true, it will much better support the type of documents that I produce and I will likely use ID to a much greater extent in the future.

    I should also observe that Adobe made the effort to attract Quark users by making an alternate set of keyboard commands available for ID that mimic those of QXP. No such alternate command set was developed to ease the transision of former PageMaker users. (Was this an oversight or did Adobe not expect to attract many PageMaker users with InDesign?)

    There has been a long term myth that Quark Xpress is _the_ DTP program. While QXP has a number of important features that are particularly helpful to magazine and newspaper publishers and other large networked publishing operations, it offers only moderate competition to the other page layout products for most DTP chores. Of course, it is people involved in magazine publishing who wrote the reviews that gave Quark considerable help in gaining its current dominant market share of graphic artists.

  • anonymous says:

    As long as there are service providers, there will always be a need for an up-to-date version of Pagemaker. Personally, as a graphic designer, I prefer Quark. I am also the resident “InDesign expert” simply because I am the only one with ID 1.5 on a machine (Mac). My experience with this new “wonder program” has left me with the opinion it is not much better than Publisher at this point (which I also have the distinct displeasure of being the “expert”). That said, due to our client base, the service provider I work for is constantly challenged by files (brochures, books, manuals, posters, stationary…) given to us created in Word, Powerpoint, Publisher and yes, even Excel. In an effort to educate our customers in ways to make their jobs flow easier & save them money (no to mention furstration to us), we have always strongly recommended switching to Pagemaker. For someone with little to no layout background, it is a program that is fairly easy to learn on the fly. If this category of customers is forced to choose between InDesign, Quark or Word, which do you think the office secretary in charge of the dept. newsletter will choose? (hint – it’s a Microsoft product!). I’m hoping that this latest update is in no way the last.

  • anonymous says:

    InDesign is my favorite to work with (QX vs PM vs ID) from a layout and design standpoint… however, it is still “bloatware” that runs the slowest, requires more resources than my PhotoShop 6 (with quite a few plug-ins), and creates files that are HUGE compared to those created by either QX or PM. I’ve preferred the intutiveness of PM — which carries over to ID, but can’t stand up to QX. If Adobe would focus it’s efforts on ID, and do a few tweaks, it would send QX scrambling and make me (as one of many other professionals) very happy.

  • anonymous says:

    Ms. Dennis, I must disagree with your take on PageMaker 7 for a couple of reasons: 1. I have never heard a real critique of PageMaker’s weaknesses vs. Quark XPress. I realize this debate is passe in the wake of InDesign, but I’ve used all three products (as well as Framemaker), and PageMaker holds its own. In fact, for things such as long-document production, it is superior to XPress with its “book” feature and yes, the Story Editor. What technical advantages account for XPress’s dominance in the marketplace (and no, “Everyone uses it, no one uses PageMaker” isn’t the answer I’m looking for). 2. Granted, I’m not terribly interested in the new features in 7, but positioning PageMaker as a “business publishing” alternative makes perfect sense. It’s certainly more elegant and robust than Publisher. I’ve used Publisher, and it’s as ugly as you’d expect. In a former job, I wrote and edited technical proposals, and PageMaker was the perfect application for making them clean, attarctive, and readable.
    I guess my point is that PageMaker still fills a need and is therefore a product that should not “exit stage left.”

  • anonymous says:

    I agree wholeheartedly. I started out with PageMaker in the ’80s also, and stuck with it through the mid-’90s. I finally had to go to Quark for a program that wouldn’t keep crashing in the middle of huge documents. Now, PageMaker is mostly a nostalgia trip for me, and I doubt I’d consider a 7th version.

  • kimhhp says:

    Had Pagemaker outlived its usefullness, it would have long been eliminated from my hard drive. But like an old pair of tennis shoes, it’s nice to have it in the closet. Although other publishing programs ‘can do more’ there are times when ‘more’ isn’t what is called for in a particular project. There is nothing wrong updating a tried and true workhorse. Pagemaker is like an old friend, I don’t throw out friends simply because their hair is turning a little grey. I’ll hang on to Pagemaker. (By the way — I still have pong)

  • anonymous says:

    I still use PageMaker for many jobs because of its awesome speed and simplicity. I can launch the application and complete a layout before InDesign or Quark really get started. So while I agree with the concern about market fragmentation, I certainly believe there’s room for both products. The challenge for Adobe will be differentiating the two brands in the minds of consumers.

  • anonymous says:

    Some of us have remained loyal to PageMaker. I wouldn’t mind moving to Indesign but here in the UK there is no offer pricing to move from PM to Indesign. If Adobe really think Indesign is the future, they need to make sure it is ready for prime time and offer their loyal customer base a deal.

  • anonymous says:

    I disagree with the article on PageMaker. I use Quark, PageMaker, and Publisher. Out of all of them I find PageMaker to be the easiest and most powerfull to use.

    Yes I am a professional designer. PageMaker is easy use as far as direct to film. It is also great in any book format that may be used. Quark is nothing but a struggle with it’s obnoxious boxes needed for everything you do and it’s inability to create a booklet layout. I don’t have time to struggle with a program, I want a program that will do what I want when I want it to.

    I also find printing from Quark frustrating, your information has to be re-entered each time you print because it doesn’t remember anything you tell it.

    Publisher is a low budget program that gives designers a headache whenever a customer comes in expecting to get quality four color spot print from a program that is not capable of handling color separations to the fullest extent.

    I have long been a fan of PageMaker and will continue to be a fan. No one has ever been able to explain to me the reason why Quark is supposed to be so much better than PageMaker, I just get told that it’s just because . . . I have never found an article on precisely what the strengths and weaknesses are on both programs when compaired to each other. So Quark has a lot of convincing to do before I become a fan of that program.

  • anonymous says:

    In agreeing with Anita Dennis, I feel somewhat miffed with Adobe. A year ago we heard about In Design with the implication that PageMaker would probably no longer be supported. (At least that seemed logical) After reading several reviews early on I decided to hang with PM. Finally early this year I upgraded all my Adobe stuff and bought an InDesign 1.5.2 program which is sooo sluggish on my PIII/1Gig PC with 256 Mb RAM and 32Mb video that I do almost all my design in PM 6.5. (By the way, yes I am a designer/printer for a large church) Now it seems to me that Adobe’s trying to hit the MS Publisher market. As Anita mentioned the Publisher cost is so small I think Adobe seems to be banging it’s head on the MS wall. I hate to see a company like Adobe waist time and money.

    I think Ms. Dennis was right on in suggesting that PM bow out and Adobe develope a lite version that could be competitively priced and simplified for non-professionals. Though I don’t like Publisher, I’m forced to deal with it because our office staff all use it to do small promotional flyers which are copied or printed on our digital printers or offset equipment. I act as a service bureau who deals with file preparation issues from people who no little or nothing about it. It makes their job easy and mine more difficult.

    Anyway, I said all that to say this: Anita Dennis has struck a chord with me. I’ve been wondering why Adobe bothered with PM 7. Perhaps a more comprehensive upgrade for In Design to motivate profesionals to begin using it more would be time (and money) better spent. PageMaker and the other Adobe products have served me well for the last ten years. I’d like to see then clarify their direction for us so we can produce the best designs possible.

  • anonymous says:

    I disagree that PageMaker is on its way out. Although I agree that Adobe’s got a lot going on and would like to see some of the InDesign elements rolled up into PageMaker, I don’t see Quark or InDesign taking over for Page Maker.

  • anonymous says:

    I whole heartedly agree with this article. As a service bureau manager that deals with all sorts of file types from all sorts of platforms, there is a REALLY good reason that Pagemaker has earned the industry wide reputation as RAGEmaker.

    By today’s standards, unless all you do is black only text with no graphics, it is the sorriest collection of half-implemented layout tools on the market. (Actually MS Publisher is the sorriest, but Pagemaker is a close second.) Our shop has lost more money re-running jobs from this program. It allows designers to violate every law of print design (trapping? who needs trapping?), and does not give the print shops much in the way of workarounds.

    And if Mac Pagemaker weren’t bad enough, trying to run PC Pagemaker is enough to give you a brain hemmorage. Between the font handling and the graphics interface, anything more complex than a 1 color newsletter has better than an 80% chance of failure.

    I was so excited when InDesign was announced, not because I thought it was gonna be the next Quark-Killer, but because it would be the next Pagemaker killer. When I saw them announce version 7, I immediately decided that all RAGEmaker files would command a 50% PITA (Pain in the A**) surcharge.

    I gotta admit, I’m not all that enthusiastic about InDesign either, but as a version 1.5 product it has a hundred times more potential than Pagemaker could ever have even if they never let the old beast die.

    Here’s my plea to Adobe. Kill Pagemaker, Please! Give InDesign to the kids playing with plastic hammers. Once they use a professional tool, they’ll be loyal customers for life! (and maybe I’ll make a decent living running their files!) JMHO.

  • anonymous says:

    One thing that Steve Jobs discovered about Apple when he returned as CEO
    was that the company offered way too many models of their computers and
    confused the consumers as to which one they needed for their work. I think
    Adobe is headed in the same direction with Photoshop, and their new Photoshop
    Lite program, PageMaker, InDesign, and FrameMaker, etc. It just creates aggravation
    and uncertainty for the untrained consumer. If they could just sell 1 imaging package,
    1 DTP package, that would save the little guy a lot of time in terms of making
    a choice. I think Quark is on the verge of making a similar mistake by trying to
    re-model their application for the web and XML. Quark is strong for printing, just make
    it stronger Quark, don’t try to do what you did with Immedia.

    In the end these companies should simplify their lines of products. Just try to
    navigate Adobe’s products page on their site. You’ll click away in seconds.

  • anonymous says:

    I’ve just swapped to InDesign because I got sick of Word documents crashing Pagemaker 6.5. Apart from the MS incompatibility, both programs work well enough, but now that I’ve started to unlearn PM commands, I’m not going back.

  • anonymous says:

    Having just tried MS Word for the first time and seeing that it’s the same box after box as all the other graphic design programs,I went back to my old standby, PageMaker. What is going on with these software designers? Don’t they understand that the average user of their products, and even professional user, wants a product that will be in a straight forward design to enable him/her to get the most of their time. The product manuels are getting bigger and bigger, and just when we learn the newest version, here comes another, with that many more boxes. Look at Corel Draw! PageMaker has always been a straight forward program, easy to learn and gets the project out the quickest. I admit it has it’s bugs, but doesn’t everything. Gates still can’t get Windows to work all day without locking up two or three times (or more). Adobe, keep up the good work, and let’s have PageMaker 7 with some simple customer suggested upgrades and not a bunch of boxes and a 3 foot manuel.

  • anonymous says:

    Let PageMaker go! If service bureaus and printing companies are going to support InDesign files, Adobe needs to stand behind its product to standardize its usage.

  • anonymous says:

    extremely well written.

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