It wasn’t that long ago that you could find all sorts of big box PC software at the thrift store. But as the years go on, it gets rarer and rarer. People who don’t know about the collector’s market just toss old software in the trash. People who do know about the collector’s market are putting anything remotely interesting on eBay, which cuts into the number of bargain finds. It’s still worth the effort, though, because interesting items cross my path now and again. Luck was on my side in October when I found a boxed copy of Aldus PageMaker at a thrift store in southern New Hampshire. I brought home a piece of my career history for the cool cost of four dollars—a fraction of its original MSRP.

PageMaker found in store. — It belongs in a computer museum!

I first encountered PageMaker when I enrolled in my high school’s graphic arts program. I didn’t know a point from a pica, but I was a budding artist and a hopeless computer nerd, and so computer graphic design seemed like the best way to mash all of my interests together.. Before I knew it I was thrust into a world of Illustrator, Photoshop, and yes, PageMaker. My high school used PageMaker extensively, thanks to educational licensing deals with Adobe. QuarkXPress had completely captured the professional market by the late nineties, but it was too XPensive for us. Adobe squeezed revenue out of the flagging PageMaker by catering to price sensitive organizations like schools. Plenty of millennial designers like me graduated into PageMaker after an elementary curriculum of Print Shop and KidPix.

If you’ve got eagle eyes, you might notice that this copy of PageMaker is for Windows. The Mac’s long reign as the king of graphic arts was thanks largely to PageMaker being the Mac’s first killer app. But Paul Brainerd, founder of Aldus, knew that staying exclusive to the Mac would limit Aldus’ growth. IBM PC users needed page layout programs too, so in 1987 Aldus released PageMaker for IBM compatibles.

One problem with porting to IBM was that PageMaker required a graphical user interface. Instead of rolling their own GUI toolkit, Aldus ported PageMaker to Microsoft Windows and included a copy of Windows 1.0 in the box. It was a bold move at the time, since Windows was rough around the edges and years away from being the dominant PC OS we all know and tolerate. Later versions utilized the stripped-down Windows runtime to provide a graphical interface without the expense of a full copy of Windows. Shipping a GUI runtime with an app wasn’t unusual at the time—Microsoft did this with Word and Excel for years, and America Online’s standalone version used the Windows runtime too. By version 4.0 Aldus expected you to supply your own copy of Windows 3.0—there’s no runtime included at all. If Windows wasn’t your jam, PageMaker was also available for IBM’s 32-bit operating system, OS/2. That might be the business equivalent of lighting money on fire, but I’m sure OS/2 users appreciated it.

Aldus wasn’t the only company bringing graphical page layout apps to the PC. Ventura Publisher and Frame Technology’s FrameMaker were just a few of PageMaker’s contemporary competitors. There was a healthy business selling to PC users, but the Mac continued to dominate the graphics and publishing industries. There was just one problem—Apple’s mid-nineties malaise meant that if Apple went down, they’d take the graphics industry ship with them. Eventually Quark and Adobe followed Aldus’ lead and ported their applications to Windows, giving them insurance against Apple’s business blunders.

What’s In The Box?

If you were one of those Windows users who bought a copy of PageMaker, what did you get in the box? The software itself comes on five 1.2 megabyte high density 5 1/4 inch floppy diskettes. In addition to these actual-floppies, Aldus offered PageMaker 4.0 on seven 3 1/2 inch 720k not-so-floppies. You could even order a copy on 360K double-density 5 1/4 inch disks, but I bet only a handful took Aldus up on that offer. I wonder which format was more popular, because computers of 1991 often had both styles of floppy drive. Since the 3 1/2 inch disks are 720K, that version needs seven disks compared to five for the larger format. Version 4.0 was the last version to offer 5 1/4 inch floppies, since 5.0 offered a CD-ROM option in their place.

Inside the box is a full complement of manuals and documentation. The first group is what I’d call the supplementary materials. Things like a quick reference for keyboard shortcuts, a printed version of the software license agreement, and a listing of Aldus-approved educational materials, training companies, and service bureaus. A printed template guide provided a handy visual reference for all the included design templates for things like business cards, newsletters, and calendars.

The most amusing of these pack-in items is a very condescending anti-piracy leaflet. It implores you to think of all the theoretical sales you’re depriving from the poor Aldus Corporation when you copy that floppy. I won’t dwell on that leaflet too long, except to point out the irony of Aldus lecturing someone who already paid them for the software in question.

Next is a quick start guide along with the primary reference manual, table editor guide, and the version supplement. The quick start guide has all the steps for installing the software, a listing of menus and tools, and a quick tutorial for making a sample document. It’s nice and all, but that’s just a warmup for the main event: the reference manual. I love the reference manual—it’s well written and comparable to a guide book you’d buy in a store. This was back in the day when manuals were written like actual books, and companies ran their documentation teams like real publishers. Manuals like these died for a variety of reasons—they were heavy, costly, and not as convenient as online help. I also think a lot of companies—especially Adobe—realized that manuals were an untapped source of revenue. It’s no coincidence that Classroom in a Book's popularity soared after Adobe excised the printed materials from their software.

Improvements in PageMaker 4.0

If you ponied up $150 of 1991 dollars to buy a PageMaker 4.0 upgrade, you got a lot of new features for your money. A lot of these were playing catch-up to QuarkXPress after it stole a lot of PageMaker’s marketshare at the end of the eighties. Still, if you were an everyday user, a lot of these features seem mighty compelling. Let’s check them out.

Long document support. PageMaker 3.0 had a 128 page limit per file. 4.0 introduced a 999 page limit per file, which as far as I can remember hung on until the bitter end of 7.0.
Color graphics support. Version 3.0 supported spot colors and you could colorize text or linework, but displaying actual color images was right out. 4.0 added support for 24-bit full color images. Better late than never.
Story editor with spell checking. Instead of writing in the pasteboard view, a word processor-like story editor allowed for composing long text documents without writing them in a different word processor first.
Search and Replace. Searching a document isn’t just for words, it’s also for styles and metadata. PageMaker 4.0 added style-based search and replace, making it easy to reformat documents without needing to manually select every instance of fourteen point Helvetica.
Inline graphics placement. Previous versions always required placing images in their own frames. Now you could place graphics inside of a text box. This made PageMaker easier to use for users coming from word processing programs like Microsoft Word. Inline images didn’t replace the old frame method, so you could use whichever mode you preferred.
Paragraph line control. Customizable paragraph break controls prevented widows and orphans from ruining the flow of your document. Hyphenation support was also new for 4.0.
Advanced type and text controls. PageMaker 4.0 could scale or compress type for stylish effects. 90 degree rotations for text lines were added as well. Kerning, tracking, and leading precision were also enhanced in 4.0. This was in response to QuarkXPress, which had much better type handling than PageMaker 3.0.
Book publication features. Previous versions of PageMaker lacked features that could help assemble books. Things like indexing, automatic page numbering with special section formats, and tables of contents were all new to 4.0. No more manually adjusting your TOC and page counts after cutting a weak chapter or page!
File linking improvements. PageMaker could now tell you the date and time that you placed or updated linked images and text files. It could even offer to update them automatically if it detected a new version. This was also in response to Quark, which had better link management. Alas, this is an area where PageMaker was always playing catchup.
Tables and chart support. A new utility could read table and chart data from various database and spreadsheet applications. Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Excel, and Ashton-Tate dBase were just a few of the available data sources.

Making the Page

It’s one thing to list and read about features—let’s give PageMaker a spin and check them out first-hand. Unfortunately, I don’t have a system with 5 1/4 inch disk drives to run this exact copy of PageMaker, so running a copy in DOSbox will have to do. There’s an installer app that copies all the files and configures all the settings, and it’s about as easy as 1991-era installers go. If hard drive space is tight, you can omit unnecessary printer drivers and template files during installation. One advantage of DOSox is that things are much zippier thanks to solid-state storage. Actual hardware would require a lot more time and floppy swapping, so that’s one bullet dodged. Printer drivers come on a separate disk, and PageMaker supports HP LaserJets, a generic PCL device, and a generic PostScript device. PostScript Printer Description files—PPDs—are included for common PostScript printers of the day, like Apple LaserWriters. There’s no copy protection other than a serial number, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it checked for other copies running on a local area network.

After the installation finished there was a shiny new Aldus group in Program Manager. After the first launch complained about configuration settings—I needed to add some PATH entries to autoexec.bat—PageMaker finally came to life. So many memories came back to me after perusing the palettes and combing through the commands. I didn’t even need a refresher from the manual to place an image, set some text, and print a file—just like old times! PageMaker 4.0’s user interface is remarkably bare compared to 1990s Quark XPress, let alone modern InDesign. It’s riddled with modal dialog boxes and pull-down menus—definitely signs of a pre-toolbar and tabbed palette world. Speaking of those dialog boxes, their layouts were ripped right out the Mac version. Seasoned PageMaker users will appreciate the consistency, but they definitely look out of place in a Windows environment. When it comes to toolboxes, three palettes are all you get for your computer pasteup needs: tools, styles, and colors. Make it work, designers!

Despite its age, this software can still produce legitimate work—after all, PostScript is one of its output options. Just tell the PostScript printer driver to write your output to a PS file and you’ve got something that can be opened in Illustrator or distilled to a PDF. If you have a PostScript-compatible printer, I bet you could print to it directly with the appropriate PPD. I made a quick test document with some text and a graphic, saved it to a PostScript file, and dumped it into Acrobat Distiller. After a few seconds, I had a PDF file that I could send to any print shop in the world. If you go to the blog post for this episode, you can compare PageMaker’s on-screen display versus the finished PDF, which is equivalent to a “printed” piece. PageMaker’s display is a jagged, low resolution mess, while printed output is crisp and precise. Quite the difference, no?

Despite the popularity of “What You See Is What You Get” marketing, the actual quality of our screens paled in comparison to what a laser printer could do. 1991 was still the era of separate screen and printer fonts. Screen fonts were hand-drawn with pixels to match specific point sizes, whereas printer fonts used glyphs composed from curves and lines that could be rasterized to any point size. This was necessary at the time because computers were too slow to dynamically render those outline fonts to the display. Screen fonts also had hints to help fonts look better on low-resolution computer displays. So long as you stuck to the provided point sizes, you’d be fine. But choosing a non-standard point size with a screen font transformed your type into terrible tacky trash. Eventually programs like Adobe Type Manager brought the power of outline fonts to computer displays using antialiasing techniques, so long as you had a computer powerful enough to use it without lag.

Graphics also used low-resolution previews to save precious memory and CPU cycles. Vector graphics were infinitely scalable when printed, but all the user saw on screen was a blocky, low-resolution proxy. Raster images could also use a proxy workflow thanks to another Aldus invention: the Open Prepress Interface, or OPI for short. A designer would place a low-res proxy image into their document along with an OPI link to a high resolution file. At print time the raster image processor follows the link and overwrites the low-res image with the high-res one. By using OPI, all the heavy high-res files could live on a big, beefy server and reduce the time it takes to spool files to a printer or imagesetter. Because of these limitations, I frequently printed scrap proofs to double check my work. When InDesign launched with a high resolution preview mode for images and graphics, it was a revelation.

To Aldus’ credit, they ate their own dog food—the manuals and boxes were designed with PageMaker and Freehand. The jury’s out on whether they used SuperPaint for the raster graphics. Even with all the improvements included in PageMaker 4.0 and 5.0, nothing could really stem the bleeding of users to Quark XPress, because XPress’ frame-based toolset and mathematical precision were just that good. It made layout easier and more predictable than PageMaker, and its library of third-party XTensions helped you create designs that were impossible in PageMaker.

How could Aldus beat Quark under those tough circumstances? PageMaker’s code aged poorly, and rewriting it would take a lot of time and money. Maybe it was time to start over. Aldus was already developing a replacement for PageMaker at the time of their merger with Adobe in 1994. This project, codenamed K2, wouldn’t just replace PageMaker; it would challenge QuarkXPress for the title of desktop publishing champion. Speaking of Quark, they attempted to buy Adobe in 1998. This incensed Adobe cofounder John Warnock. What gave Quark, a company a third the size of Adobe, the right to commit a hostile takeover? Fueled by Adobe’s money and spite, the former Aldus team redoubled their efforts to build a Quark killer. K2 launched as Adobe InDesign in 1999, featuring high-res previews, native Illustrator and Photoshop file support, and killer typography. By 2003 it was the hot new design package everyone wanted to use—but we’ll come back to that story another day.

Looking back, I don’t think I have much fondness for PageMaker as a program. I was more productive when I used QuarkXPress, and the work I produced with Quark looked better, too. But it’s hard for me to separate my memories of PageMaker from my memories of learning the basics of design. It’s like looking back at the Commodore 64—I recognize PageMaker’s achievements, and the things we did together, but I’m perfectly fine with not using it on a daily basis anymore. I produced a lot of printed materials for the city of Pittsfield, Massachusetts and its public schools using PageMaker. None of it was particularly good or remarkable, but all artists say that about their early work. Still, I couldn’t have built my career in the graphic arts without PageMaker. I’m glad I found this copy, and I hope it enjoys a comfortable retirement on my shelf.