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Desktop publishing program From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Adobe PageMaker (formerly Aldus PageMaker) is a desktop publishing computer program introduced in 1985 by the Aldus Corporation on the Apple Macintosh.[1] The combination of the Macintosh's graphical user interface, PageMaker publishing software, and the Apple LaserWriter laser printer marked the beginning of the desktop publishing revolution. Ported to PCs running Windows 1.0 in 1987,[2] PageMaker helped to popularize both the Macintosh platform and the Windows environment.[3][4]
 | |
PageMaker 7.0 running on Mac OS 9 | |
| Original author(s) | Aldus Corporation |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Adobe Systems |
| Final release | 7.0.2
/ 30 March 2004 |
| Operating system | Windows XP and earlier Mac OS 9 OS/2 v3.01 |
| Successor | Adobe InDesign |
| Type | Desktop publishing |
| License | Trialware |
A key component that led to PageMaker's success was its native support for Adobe Systems' PostScript page description language. After Adobe purchased the majority of Aldus's assets (including FreeHand, PressWise, PageMaker, etc.) in 1994 and subsequently phased out the Aldus name, version 6 was released. The program remained a major force in the high-end DTP market through the early 1990s, but new features were slow in coming. By the mid-1990s, it faced increasing competition from QuarkXPress on the Mac, and to a lesser degree, Ventura on the PC, and by the end of the decade it was no longer a major force. Quark proposed buying the product and canceling it, but instead, in 1999 Adobe released their "Quark Killer", Adobe InDesign. The last major release of PageMaker came in 2001, and customers were offered InDesign licenses at a lower cost.
Development of PageMaker had flagged in the later years at Aldus and, by 1998, PageMaker had lost almost the entire professional market[17] to the comparatively feature-rich QuarkXPress 3.3, released in 1992, and 4.0, released in 1996. Quark stated its intention to buy out Adobe and to divest the combined company of PageMaker to avoid anti-trust issues. Adobe rebuffed the offer and instead continued to work on a new page layout application code-named "Shuksan" (later "K2"), originally started by Aldus, openly planned and positioned as a "Quark killer". This was released as Adobe InDesign 1.0 in 1999.[18][19]
The last major release of PageMaker was 7.0 in 2001, after which the product was seen as "languishing on life support".[20] Adobe ceased all development of PageMaker in 2004 and "strongly encouraged" users to migrate to InDesign, initially through special "InDesign PageMaker Edition" and "PageMaker Plug-in" versions, which added PageMaker's data merge, bullet, and numbering features to InDesign, and provided PageMaker-oriented help topics, complimentary Myriad Pro fonts, and templates.[21] From 2005, these features were bundled into InDesign CS2, which was offered at half-price to existing PageMaker customers.[22][23]
No new major versions of Adobe PageMaker have been released since, and it does not ship alongside Adobe InDesign.
BYTE in 1989 listed PageMaker 3.0 as among the "Distinction" winners of the BYTE Awards, stating that it "is the program that showed many of us how to use the Macintosh to its full potential".[24]
Adobe PageMaker file formats use various filename extensions, including PMD, PM3, PM4, PM5, PM6 and P65; these should be able to be opened in the applications Collabora Online, LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice, they can then be saved into the OpenDocument format or other file formats.
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