PageMaker heads to Web

Foreshadowing this week's Seybold conference surely to be dominated by Internet publishing news, Adobe Systems (ADBE) today announced fourth-quarter availability for the next version of its PageMaker desktop publishing program, retooled for the Web.

PageMaker 6.5, like much of its graphic design software brethren this year, is geared for users who want their work on the Web. Its Internet focus, added only a year after PageMaker 6.0 was released, includes the ability to add hyperlinks as well as allowing reformatting to onscreen settings, which lets users, for example, save a document as a 640-by-480 pixel image, instead of a print format like 8.5 by 11 inches. When a file is exported into HTML or PDF formats, the graphics are automatically saved as either JPEG or GIF files.

PageMaker 6.5 does not support Java, but it does include a QuickTime import filter so authors can embed QuickTime movies in documents.

Other new features include layers, a concept borrowed from Adobe Photoshop. Layers are separate templates within a document that let a publisher replace global elements of a work--English text with German, for example--without changing the art or background. Release 6.5 is the first version of PageMaker to be cross-compatible with other Adobe products to allow elements to be dragged and dropped from one program to another.

PageMaker 6.5 will be available in the fourth quarter for a suggested price of $895.