Aldus Pagemaker was my first piece of software I really learned to use, back in the early ’90s. I was going to Catonsville Community College at the time and took a professor’s suggestion to volunteer at the student newspaper to heart. Pagemaker was the defacto page layout program at the time, though it was starting to lose ground to Quarkxpress (which today is losing ground to Indesign).

These days Pagemaker is no longer being developed, though it is being sold by Adobe. Mere mention of its name in prepress/print or design circles is likely to bring up bad memories and sheer terror. Not for me though. I always thought it was nice piece of software and have a soft spot for it. I first learned it back on version 4.2, which could only open one document at a time and could only rotate images in 90 degree angles. Unlike most other page apps, you didn’t have to draw a box before typing and bringing in a graphics and it didn’t require much learning. You could just pick it up and go. I continued using it for the early part of my career, working for the MTA and over at French Bray, but by the time of French Bray it was pretty universally hated and most of the Pagemaker jobs were dumped on me by the other techs ‘cause they didn’t know how to use it.

Much as I liked it though, it was unreliable. It had a tendency to crash at odd times, taking your document with it, its default settings made it too easy for novices to embed graphics in the file, which could cause huge files which caused no end of problems when it came to output time.

And yet… I still have a soft spot for it. It was the first piece of software I came to know inside and out, like the back of my hand. Back at CCC, working on the student newspaper was a lot of fun, banging out a newspaper while trying to make the world better college life drama swirled around us (ok maybe it started with us!). It was a good tool, well used, sometimes hated, occasionally missed and slowly disappearing behind me.

It’s amazing what walking away from the computer can do. Rather than work on my day off, I revisted some favorite short stories, went outside and played a bit of bocce with the kid and enjoyed the sun. Nothing like recharging.

Anyway, got a response to some questions I posted on Adobe’s Incopy forum and it’s not great news. Incopy is quite limited by design and assumes writers and editors are complete idiots when it comes to layout. Basically, the assignments from Indesign are handed out via the production people and the writers have a little flexibility with transforming graphics, but not much. The whole point of Incopy, I thought, was to give writers a more visual idea of how their stories will fit. Yet when creating a new document, you automatically get a .5 margin around your text area. Why? Who has that space in newspaper/magazine environment? Also, you can’t easily specify the depth of your stories in oh say, INCHES or another other such physical measurement, it’s all based on words, lines, columns or pages. Nice idea, but not practical for less than ideal environments.

And the huge glaring point in all this is that Indesign users can’t work on the same document at once. Yes, the writers and designer can work on the same document, or more than 1 writer and single designer can, but never more than one designer. And should the production department be assigning writers their stories? Isn’t that more and Editor in chief job? Yeah, the designer is probably getting the space or specs from a chief, but why keep the chief outta the loop?

The Live-edit work-flow sounds great, but it needs work. Quark 7 is supposed to have composition zones which can be worked on by anyone, so hopefully Adobe will crib from that idea.

I’ve been spending most of this week working with Indesign and figuring out Incopy, the word processor on steriods that intergrates with Indesign. It enables a more collaborative work-flow, one were writers and designers can work on the same document, but in their respective tasks: writers work on the copy while designers work on the layout.

But it’s new beast, a bit radical in the way it forces you to work, to the extent that it’s overwhelming and disorientating. And if me, the production manager, is confused, the less tech savvy writers will be really thrown for a loop.

Much of what I’ve learned over the past two days has been by trial and error and reading the online help (which you can’t easily print out!!!). I’ll have to get hold of the manual from the IT department, even if it’s just a PDF, ‘cause some of the concepts are really strange. There’s not much about it on the web, except for a series of articles over at Quark vs Indesign. There’s also a book about it, by some Adobe engineers. I’ll pick up today or tomorrow, but in the meantime, I’ll be doing a bit more trial and error tomorrow.