Who here Uses Adobe Pagemaker?

[Felon]

Hmm. IIRC I used an Adobe product called InDesign a few years back. It was basically just a minor web-design tool for applying bitmaps to vector shapes to create buttons with bevels and engravings and such. Pretty limited functionality. Are we talking about the same app?

 

[Felon]

The best way to make tables in Pagemaker, imo, is to spend $299 and upgrade to InDesign. It has an awesome table tool, and Pagemaker is a dead end product, now -- Adobe will never release a new version. The $299 price is an upgrade to InDesign CS -- originally you could upgrade for $99, and it's likely to just keep getting more expensive. But yeah, $300 is a lot of bucks for a hobby. Without that I'm pretty sure you're stuck with either Tablemaker or the highly manual method, unfortunately.

Three hundred bucks ain't chicken-feed, that's for sure. Does it at least have the table-designer built in? It's not a separate UI altogether like Pagemaker stuck me with is it?

I think it's a little nuts for them not to keep Pagemaker around as a low-end product for enthusiasts. Don't they still sell a PhotoShop LE for those not willing to shell the big bucks for the real thing?

 

[Dimwhit]

Hmm. IIRC I used an Adobe product called InDesign a few years back. It was basically just a minor web-design tool for applying bitmaps to vector shapes to create buttons with bevels and engravings and such. Pretty limited functionality. Are we talking about the same app?

Yep, but InDesign since then it has turned into a high-end page-layout app that rivals (and in most of its user's opinions outshines) QuarkXPress.

 

[Cergorach]

Yep, but InDesign since then it has turned into a high-end page-layout app that rivals (and in most of its user's opinions outshines) QuarkXPress.

Scuse me? This must have been before the release of Indesign 1.0, otherwise i don't have a clue what your talking about.

 

[Dana_Jorgensen]

Scuse me? This must have been before the release of Indesign 1.0, otherwise i don't have a clue what your talking about.

I think they're talking about ImageReady, which got folded into Photoshop.

As far as doing layout work goes, one thing to consider when selecting your layout software is font embedding. The default to a nasty thinline serifed font in many PDFs I have paid for makes it pretty clear that this is a problem a lot of new publishers are unaware of until they try to publish on paper. Ever since Adobe decided to obey the font restriction flags in truetype fonts (and I know a few competitors followed suit), doing layouts has become a big hassle, thanks not only to those flags, but to the wide variety of those flags (some won't embed, others won't print, some are flagged as "no sharing", etc).

For adobe, the line got drawn at Acrobat 4.0; before that, all fonts got embedded, after that, it became a shooting match. So if you're using any adobe software developed after 1998, set yourself up with a document with a sampling of all your fonts, then generate a PDF and take it to a different computer so you can determine exactly what fonts you have that are "useless".

At that point, you have the choice of: using certain non-Adobe layout programs or PDF generators, getting a font editor and changing all the flags to embedable (an annoying task and violates the software licenses with most fonts), or replacing the unembedable fonts with similar embedable ones.

 

[Dimwhit]

I think they're talking about ImageReady, which got folded into Photoshop.

As far as doing layout work goes, one thing to consider when selecting your layout software is font embedding. The default to a nasty thinline serifed font in many PDFs I have paid for makes it pretty clear that this is a problem a lot of new publishers are unaware of until they try to publish on paper. Ever since Adobe decided to obey the font restriction flags in truetype fonts (and I know a few competitors followed suit), doing layouts has become a big hassle, thanks not only to those flags, but to the wide variety of those flags (some won't embed, others won't print, some are flagged as "no sharing", etc).

For adobe, the line got drawn at Acrobat 4.0; before that, all fonts got embedded, after that, it became a shooting match. So if you're using any adobe software developed after 1998, set yourself up with a document with a sampling of all your fonts, then generate a PDF and take it to a different computer so you can determine exactly what fonts you have that are "useless".

At that point, you have the choice of: using certain non-Adobe layout programs or PDF generators, getting a font editor and changing all the flags to embedable (an annoying task and violates the software licenses with most fonts), or replacing the unembedable fonts with similar embedable ones.

You may be right. Probably ImageReady.

I use InDesign to generate my PDFs for print, and it does a great job embedding all the fonts. I've had great success. Not one problem. I haven't used Distiller for several years, and my life has been much easier.

 

[Felon]

You may be right. Probably ImageReady.

It wasn't ImageReady, it was something more geared towards creating web UI features than optimizing graphics for the web, but it might not've InDesign either. Whatever it was, it was not terribly impressive and it sure wasn't a layout tool.

At any rate, I have gotten my hands on a friend's ImageReady 2.0, so I'll see how it handles tables. Hopefully I won't have to resort to what it looked like I was gonna have to do: creating in my nicely-formatted tables in a word processor then converting them into TIFs, crop them, and paste them into the layout draft.

[EDIT--Just remembered. It was ImageStyler I was thinking of.]

 

[Fast Learner]

Three hundred bucks ain't chicken-feed, that's for sure. Does it at least have the table-designer built in? It's not a separate UI altogether like Pagemaker stuck me with is it?

It's completely integrated, and quite good. The only thing they don't (yet) have is table styles; that is to say that you can't create a nifty table, select it, and then save it as a full-table style that you could apply to another table. You can, of course, still apply paragraph and character styles to the contents of any table.

InDesign is super-scriptable if you dig that kind of thing. As such for one PDF I worked on that had literally hundreds of tables that had only 3 different "table style" I wrote a little script that would apply all of the table attributes to whatever table my cursor was in. As such I sort-of had table styles and it only took 1 second (a keyboard shortcut) to apply the "style" to each table. Very sweet in the end.

 

[Fast Learner]

At any rate, I have gotten my hands on a friend's ImageReady 2.0, so I'll see how it handles tables.

I hope you mean InDesign 2.0 and not ImageReady 2.0, as the latter is an image manipulation tool, not a page layout tool with nice table options.

 

[Dimwhit]

It's completely integrated, and quite good. The only thing they don't (yet) have is table styles; that is to say that you can't create a nifty table, select it, and then save it as a full-table style that you could apply to another table. You can, of course, still apply paragraph and character styles to the contents of any table.

InDesign is super-scriptable if you dig that kind of thing. As such for one PDF I worked on that had literally hundreds of tables that had only 3 different "table style" I wrote a little script that would apply all of the table attributes to whatever table my cursor was in. As such I sort-of had table styles and it only took 1 second (a keyboard shortcut) to apply the "style" to each table. Very sweet in the end.

Sounds cool. The main thing I have yet to use in InDesign is tables. But I don't think I've ever had a need for tables in layout. But it's something I need to learn.