Chapter 1 - Basic Information (Part 1) PageMaker

Chapter 1

Basic Information:

Adobe PageMaker is powerful and versatile page layout software. Professionals use PageMaker for its exceptional typographic controls, exacting page design capabilities, including layers, frames, and multiple master pages, and numerous customizing options.

PageMaker’s extensive importing and linking capabilities let you incorporate text, graphics, spreadsheets, charts, and movie frames from most popular programs. It also incorporates menu plug-ins that extend the program’s features and capabilities. It also supports advanced color printing technologies, including high-fidelity inks, color management support, automatic trapping, built-in imposition tools, and complete separation capabilities for text and graphics.

Let us first understand the PageMaker Window with its various components. Fig 1 shows the important areas of the PageMaker window:

Fig1.1

 Fig 1.2

You use the menu bar to give PageMaker instructions on how to set up your publication and lay out your pages. As shown in fig. 1.2, the Menu Bar contains nine different options:

File – Use this menu to manipulate your files. You can create, open, close, save, export and import files with this option. The menu also contains command for printing.

Edit – This menu contains options for cutting and pasting text and graphics.

Layout – Using this menu, you can choose to insert and delete pages. This also has the option for inserting Column Guides.

Type – The options on this menu allow you to specify the size and alignment of your text. Almost everything related to text is on the Type menu, including fonts, sizes, alignment, type styles, spacing and indentations.

Element – This menu contains options that affect graphic elements, such as lines, rectangles, and ellipses/circle, as well as imported graphics images.

Utilities – This menu is the gateway to the PageMaker plug-ins. It also contains Story Editor commands (to perform searches, replacements and spell checks) and options for creating tables of contents and indices.

View – Use this menu to view the page at different levels of magnification. For example, you can see the entire page at once with one option, or you can zoom a section of a page to twice its actual size with another. This menu also contains items that can be turned on and off, such as rulers and grides.

Window – Use this menu to control what you see in your window. For example, you can turn on and off display of the toolbox, Colors palette, control palette, and a Style palette.

Help – Use this menu to display an index of different topics on which online information is available.

In many of these menus, there are options that are unavailable at the time of selection and are dimmed. If these menu items are selected, the program just ignores them. For example, the items like Find, Find Next, etc. in fig 1.3.

Fig 1.3

Some of the menu options have a right-pointing triangle next to them. For example, on the Utilities menu, the Plug-ins have this symbol, which indicates that a cascading menu will appear when you select the option. A cascading menu shows a list of additional choices. There are other menu options which have a check mark on the left. The check mark indicates that the given option is turned on. These options are toggles, which mean that the same command turns an option both on and off. Apart from the menus in menu bar, context sensitive popup menus are available on the click of the right mouse button. 

For those who would rather not shift their hands from the keyboard to the mouse, PageMaker offers two ways to give commands from the keyboard. First, you can access the menu with the Alt Key followed by one of the underlined characters on the menu bar. This will open the said menu and you can then type the underlined letter of the desired option. A second way to give commands with the keyboard is by using keyboard shortcuts. These shortcuts usually consist of pressing the Ctrl (Control) key in conjunction with one other key. The keyboard shortcuts appear on the menu to help you memorize them.

The Toolbox, as in fig. 1.1, appears in the upper-left corner of the window, but can be moved to anywhere in the publication window. The PageMaker tools allow you to create or modify text and graphics on the page. To select a tool, just click on it. Of course, there are also keyboard shortcuts for each and every tool in the Toolbox. The table 1.1 gives the list of tools available along with the function and the icons representing each of them.

Apart from these, there is also the Control Palette as was shown in fig 1.1. In fact, there are many Palettes like Color Palette, Control Palette, Hyperlinks Palette, Master Pages Palette, Style Palette and Tools Palette. The Control Palette changes according to the tool selected in the toolbox.