Katana VentraIP

Adobe PageMaker

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]

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.

Aldus Pagemaker 1.0 was released in July 1985 for the Macintosh and in December 1986 for the IBM PC.[6]

[5]

Aldus Pagemaker 1.2 for Macintosh was released in 1986 and added support for PostScript fonts built into or downloaded to the memory of other output devices.[7] PageMaker was awarded a Codie award for Best New Use of a Computer in 1986. In October 1986, a version of Pagemaker was made available for Hewlett-Packard's HP Vectra computers. In 1987, Pagemaker was available on Digital Equipment's VAXstation computers.[6]

LaserWriter Plus

Aldus Pagemaker 2.0 was released in 1987. Until May 1987, the initial Windows release was bundled with a full version of Windows 1.0.3; after that date, a "Windows-runtime" without task-switching capabilities was included.[9] Thus, users who did not have Windows could run the application from MS-DOS.

[8]

Reception[edit]

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]

File formats[edit]

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.

Adobe - PageMaker 7 (official site)

List of Adobe PageMaker Resources sites

PageMaker History