Sarasota PC Monitor
Adobe PageMaker 7.0
A Book Review
by PeteTheisen
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.Adobe PageMaker 7.0 is the latest version of a high-end desktop publishing software package. The Sarasota PC Monitor is laid out every month in PageMaker, and has been for years. PageMaker is commonly used to produce a wide variety of printed media - from business cards to books, magazines and newspapers with as large a page as 17" x 22" - about the size of The Wall Street Journal. The finished publication can be printed on your local printer (depending upon its capability), sent to a print shop either online, on disk or in hard copy for camera reproduction - or, published on the web.
This "Classroom in a Book" is an Adobe publication designed to teach the reader how to use PageMaker 7.0. It includes a CD which contains ten lessons that are pre-built templates of the type of project the lesson teaches. The CD contains the pre-built project and the book contains the step by step instructions on how to build the project and/or modify the supplied project into one you envision yourself.
There are ten lessons in the book, including a Flyer, a set of Business Stationery for an Architect, a Project Proposal, a Jewelcase booklet, a Cycling guidebook, an Adventure newsletter, a Recreational catalogue, a Sailing publication, a Newsletter on the Web and a PDF Web page.
The printed lessons are straightforward, step-by-step guides that show you how to place and format text, photos, artwork and other visual objects into your project. The CD files are examples of what the project should be when it is done.
There is a note early in the text that PageMaker will not run from the CD, few programs will, and fewer still will run well. In that vein, I copied the lessons to a subdirectory on the hard drive. After I did that, I found that the lessons just popped right up when I opened them, and they were pretty as can be. The idea of the lesson is to follow the directions in the book to create a new file identical to the supplied file. If you can do that for all ten lessons, after you do that you will be a capable PageMaker user.
Another use for the supplied files is as templates to be modified to suit your own purposes. This is an often used shortcut in many programs, not just PageMaker, but in PageMaker it becomes a great time saver since the PageMaker files contain so many different elements that can be controlled. If you start out with a lot of these elements defined by a template, your work is much easier. If you are doing a periodical publication, your last issue is your template for the next, unless you are doing a make-over. If you need a Flyer, a set of Business Stationery, a Project Proposal, a Jewelcase booklet, a Cycling guidebook, an Adventure newsletter, a Recreational catalogue, a Sailing publication, a Newsletter on the Web or a PDF Web page - why, then you could use one of the supplied files as a starting point and modify it to suit your own needs.
Adobe PageMaker 7.0 Classroom in a Book is available from Adobe Press, a unit of Adobe, the makers of PageMaker. <www.adobe.com/adobepress/main.html> for $45. It is paper bound, includes the CD with the examples, but does not include Adobe PageMaker. You get to pay another $379 - $500 for that. This is a tutorial, not a manual. Manuals are included with PageMaker, as is online help and also hundreds of start-up tips, but the tutorial, this book, is an extra.??
Copyright 2002. This article is from the October 2002 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
The Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc. has 1,300+ members and was established in 1982. We are members of the Assoc. of PC User Groups (APCUG), the Florida Assoc. of PC Users Groups, Inc., and we are members of the America Online Ambassador Program.
See http://www.spcug.org for all reviews from the Sarasota PC Monitor, go to the Newsletter Section.