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PageMaker always ignored professional publishing--specifically newspapers. The reason for this situation is clear when you understand who developed PageMaker: a former newspaperman.
After a successful career at the Star and Tribune in Minneapolis in the '70s, Paul Brainerd left to become an executive with Atex. Eventually, Atex put Brainerd in charge of a Seattle-based subsidiary, where he came up with the idea of using the recently released Macintosh computer to do page layout. Atex (and its then-owner, Eastman Kodak) weren't interested, so Brainerd took a group of programmers, and they went out on their own. The program became PageMaker, the company became Aldus, and Brainerd became a millionaire.
All during the early days of the "desktop publishing" revolution (a phrase Brainerd concocted), the notion was to bring this functionality to nonprofessional publishers; neither Aldus nor Apple ever envisioned that the tools could be used to produce professional publications. It is alleged, in fact, that Brainerd disdained working with newspapers. He'd been there, and he knew that supporting real people was easier than supporting newspaper people. So PageMaker never achieved much penetration in the professional publishing business.
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Quark, on the other hand, courted professional publishers with a vengeance. Back in the late '80s, I once had to yell at a Quark marketer over the phone that, no, the company could not say the San Francisco Examiner was paginated with QuarkXPress. We were then doing fewer than 100 magazine and broadsheet pages a week--less than one-tenth of our total output--with 'XPress.
Yet despite the Quark marketing department's love of professional publishing, the research and development crew never pointed the product at professional publishers. In 1991 or '92, I was chatting with Tim Gill, Quark's founder, chairman and chief programmer. He said that he knew the Examiner had been published the day following the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 on QuarkXPress because the hyphenation in the paper was all wrong. In those days, 'XPress defaulted to hyphenation being off, and the Examiner editors (I had quit the paper 17 days earlier) who produced the pages had neglected to turn on the hyphenation feature.
The point of this is: The early versions of 'XPress were designed with hyphenation--the bread and butter of newspaper page layout--defaulting to off.
Still, the product took off with the professional publishing crowd. Thousands of copies of 'XPress were used at virtually every newspaper in the country despite the fact that the product rarely acknowledged this influential user base.
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After Aldus' acquisition by Adobe, PageMaker was never a real priority. The company lavished attention on Illustrator, its first consumer software product; and Photoshop, the premiere image-enhancement program.
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Though there is a method of adding features to PageMaker (called Additions) similar to 'XPress' XTensions, programmers never flocked to the Aldus/Adobe standard.
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And though the Aldus subsidiary in Ireland had begun development on a workgroup collaboration product that would work in conjunction with PageMaker (sound suspiciously like Quark Publishing System?), Adobe stopped that project.
The Remaking of PageMaker
by David M. Cole
Word out of the Silicon Valley has it that Adobe Systems Inc., purveyor of fine publishing software such as Photoshop and Illustrator, has finally realized that maybe its page-layout program, the category-pioneer PageMaker, is getting a little tattered around the edges. As reported in MacWeek in December, Adobe is well along in development of what is being called a "Quark killer." There's even discussion that the new product might not even take the PageMaker moniker.
In addition, MacWeek reported that Adobe is preparing workflow and "asset-management" packages "tailored to professional publishers."
This goes beyond good news. This extends into the great-news category. Here are some of the reasons:
All these points appear to be addressed by what Adobe is now doing. The new page layout program--code named K2--has allegedly been rewritten from the ground up. According to sources, it has a "quality" composition engine, one clearly better than that of 'XPress.
Further, the workgroup collaboration product, coded named Stilton, will have a server that can run under either UNIX or Windows NT. The asset-management product is aimed directly at the creation of advertising and large publishing operations; facilities apparently will be provided in Illustrator and Photoshop to "check in" artwork and images into the database, while K2 will have the ability to draw those same images and artwork out of the database seamlessly.
After more than a decade of dominance in the professional publishing market niche, Quark will finally have some competition.
For suppliers to the newspaper industry, this will mean an opportunity to provide customers with alternatives to the "Microsoft-Word-and-QuarkXPress" solution so prevalent today.
For newspapers, it will mean that Quark might start paying attention to our needs.
Cole is a San Francisco-based newspaper consultant and editor of The Cole Papers, a monthly newsletter on technology, journalism and publishing. E-mail, dmc@colegroup.com; phone, (650) 994-2100; fax, (650) 994-2108. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily TechNews or NAA.