Adobe PageMaker 7.0 Upgrade

Rating:
Summary: Not OS X Native
Review: Adobe has done very well with the OS X Native Photoshop and Golive applications. What were they thinking of when they released PM7? Personally, I'll never by another non-OS X native application.

Rating:
Summary: Worthy Upgrade for an excellent programme
Review: I have used PageMaker extensively for over ten years for almost everything under the sun. A fantastic programme! The icing on the cake with Version 7.0 is the addition of icons on the menu bar. It is in keeping with most programmes within the windows environment. Fabulous! If you want to dive into desktop publishing Aldus Pagemaker is definitely your pick.

Rating:
Summary: PagerMaker 7 - there's life in the old boy yet!
Review: PageMaker fans have long bemoaned the lack of attention Adobe has paid to Pagemaker. When they thought Adobe was finally going to get around to a PM upgrade, they got, instead, InDesign. With the release of PM7, however, Adobe shows that it hasn't abandoned its intensely loyal PageMaker users. This is not a significant upgrade in terms of features, which are few: native Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files can be directly placed into PM7, allowing you to skip the flattening/merging step, which allows you to update your .psd files and have them integrated quickly into your PM document. The PDF distilling options are set in PageMaker itself, not in the included Adobe Distiller 5.0, and there are more options than were previously available through the included Distiller. Interestingly, there are converters for rival Quark Express and Microsoft Publisher files, but not one for Adobe's own InDesign. Perhaps Adobe felt that no one would want to "back into" Pagemaker from InDesign: I say that since the initial versions of InDesign lacked a table of contents feature, which has been a PageMaker standard, there are a lot of Indy users who would have loved that option.
The best thing about PM7 is the changes under the hood that gear it to work with more advanced operating systems, such as Mac OS 9 and Windows 2000. (It does not run under the native Mac OS X, but it does run in OS X's Classic environment). With this breath of life, PageMaker users can rest a little easier. While Adobe seems determined to force its high-end users into InDesign, the loyal contingent who have invested time and money into their PageMaker skills can still produce top-quality documents.

Rating:
Summary: The Age of Pagemaker is over
Review: When I first used (Aldus) Pagemaker, it was version 2. At that time I thought it was the best.
A year later, I discovered QuarkXpress and nevered look back till now.
Later when Aldus was bought out by Adobe, I thought it was going to get better for PM. It has and it hasn't.
PM for years has always been second to Quark and when Adobe released InDesign 1.0, I knew it was the death knell for PM.
Professionally, I'm now using InDesign v2.0 and have jumped on the Adobe band wagon aside its bugs.
I do own a PM v 7.0 at home. It is an improvement, but a tactical mistake.
Save your money for the upgrade and use it to upgrade to InDesign CS Pagemaker version. You will be pleasantly surprised.