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Poorni Aravindan Kumar wondered: <<Is Adobe Distiller bundled with Pagemaker
installables (I will be using Pagemaker 6.5).>>
I believe that there's a full copy of version 4.x bundled with 6.5; 7.x,
which is the current version, came with Acrobat 5. There's not much reason
to choose one version over the other apart from the newer version of Acrobat
that comes with 7.x, so consider choosing whichever one you can get for less
money. (Particularly if the cost difference is significant, since the
upgrade price to 7 is only around US$100.)
<<Can I export a pagemaker file to Word. Note: The document contains many
gif files and is 600 pages.>>
You can certainly export HTML and RTF files containing the text, but complex
layouts and complex formatting will be lost; moreover, if the PM document
contains lots of oddly threaded stories, you may have a fair bit of
reconstruction work to do in Word to re-establish the correct sequence. As
for the graphics, you're better to simply reinsert them in Word.
I have to ask you why you're considering exporting to Word when PageMaker
sets much better type, and handles 600-page documents much better than Word
ever will. Need to do revision tracking to update the manual?
<<Is the learning curve for Pagemaker high. I've goog experience in Frame.>>
PageMaker is actually one of the easier DTP programs to learn, though it
does have its quirks and illogic. I learned it way back at version 4 by
following the tutorial; took about 2 hours, plus another couple hours
playing around on my own. Then again, I'm a quick study <g>, and it took
lots of practice to get really good with the software. My understanding is
that the metaphor (the program logic) is very different from that of Frame,
so you may have to unlearn some of your old habits. For one thing, creating
tables in PageMaker is far more tedious than it is in just about any other
program I've worked with unless you're a wizard with tabs or have a high
tolerance for the bundled table editor software, which is primitive.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"It's one thing to see death coming at the hands of your own creation.
That's part of the human epic tradition, after all. Oedipus and his father.
Baron Frankenstein and his monster. William Henry Gates and Windows
'09."--David Brin, _Kiln People_
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