PageMaker 4.0 Rollout: May 3, 1990, The Pointe at South Mountain.
In two two-part sessions, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, Team Aldus presented a slick production/ introduction to the “shipping in the fourth quarter” Aldus PageMaker 4.0. I attended the evening session and Paul Valach attended in the afternoon and the Graphics half of the evening. Paul brought copies of the AMUG Digest to distribute and there was a lot of interest from attendees and presentors alike.
The presentation began with a slide show composed using Aldus Persuasion 2.0, narrated by Sandy Smith, Vice President Operations. She provided a brief and effective overview of the two segments to follow. Also mentioned briefly was the acquisition of Silicon Beach. Together Aldus and Silicon Beach are the third largest Mac developer in the industry offering more Mac titles than any other developer.
Session 1 – Business publications
Working on a Mac II cx with 4 meg and 24 bit color (with Adobe Type Manager installed) and otherwise unaltered, the various and numerous new and enhanced features of PageMaker 4.0 were presented. There was an impressive list indeed. I will not attempt to cover them all. Actually, I cannot even come close to that. I will merely hit some highlights which impressed me as a desktop publisher in a small quick-print shop. Included in the PageMaker “package” is a small but powerful new program, Table Editor 1.0, developed for designing tables which can be exported to PageMaker in a text/tab or PICT file format with all the attendant advantages of each. A sophisticated “Story Editor” for word processing includes spell checking from a number of dictionaries, and a 'search and replace' function keyed to both words and attributes. The Styles power is greatly expanded; there are composers for tables of contents and indexes that are editable and can be set to automatically update, “in-line” graphics that will move with text flow, a repeat function for use when designing forms and a large number of tiny but useful enhancements such as a keyboard toggle switch between the pointer tool and other tools, and a status bar which shows the progress of a command, such as waiting for the file to save or a document to load for placement. I’ll mention lastly the Links Manager as a welcome addition for connecting all the documents and graphics you have prepared in other applications and other sections of PageMaker for composing your publication. One nifty zinger slipped in at the end of this session was the comment that Aldus Color Extension was being shipped as part of the package.
Session 2 – Graphic design
If one thought that the first segment of the presentation couldn’t be topped, the second segment did just that. They launched the session with Freehand 2.0 in glorious 24 bit color and Pantone matching, all fully compatible with PageMaker. It interacts smoothly and can be set for automatic updating of both text and graphics. The improvements that relate to typography were classy, including two levels of kerning, tenth-point type sizing, five different tracks for each type face and flexible leading controls. There were a ohhhs and ahhhs in several parts of this segment and even a few rounds of applause as improvements and enhancements were demonstrated. Yes, there are now text rotation capabilities available in 4.0, in 90 degree increments and fully editable. Fine tuning of rotated or path text will still have to be done in Freehand. The final portion was Aldus Preprint 1.0, a new color separation program for the Macintosh, specially designed to work with PageMaker 4.0, Color Extension, and individual TIFF files, taking advantage of the Open Prepress Interface
(OPI). To bring this all to a close; as you may have guessed, I was impressed. The presentation was slick and the programs were powerful. PageMaker 4.0 really is a major enhancement. As I said before, I have made no attempt to cover all of the features; please feel free to look me up at the “Best of . . .” table at the next AMUG meeting.
 (January 1993).iso/Files/Hyper/News Stacks/July'90AMUG News™.cpt/July'90AMUG News™/card_11158_render.png){kind=link}
 (January 1993).iso/Files/Hyper/News Stacks/July'90AMUG News™.cpt/July'90AMUG News™/card_11673_render.png){kind=link}