Aldus Pagemaker Views

• Software

Aldus Corporation, named after the 15th-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, was the inventor of the groundbreaking PageMaker software, a program that is generally credited with creating the desktop publishing (DTP) field. The company was founded by Jeremy Jaech, Mark Sundstrom, Mike Templeman, Dave Walter, and chairman Paul Brainerd.[1] Aldus Corporation was based in Seattle, Washington.

During the 1990s QuarkXPress steadily won ground from PageMaker, and it seemed increasingly odd that Adobee — who had created PostScript, so vital to the working of DTPc — still did not offer its own page layout application. This was resolved in September 1994 when Aldus merged with Adobe. Today, Adobe's competition to QuarkXPress is Adobe InDesign. PageMaker remains available but is no longer marketed; existing PageMaker customers are now urged to switch to InDesign.

The logo is variation on the original logo from Aldus PageMaker and depicts Aldus Manutius, a student of Johannes Gutenberg and inventor of italics. This is to echo the roots of desktop publishing, both in the 1450s and the 1980s. The logo uses Courier from ITC to evoke the feel of metal type and Poetica from Adobe Systems to evoke the era of hand lettering.

PageMaker continued to evolve, reaching new heights with version 4.2, which had such essential features as text rotation and a story editor. Despite some interesting marketing ploys (see boxer shorts, left) Aldus had lost significant market share to QuarkXPress, which had some powerful features, such as color separation, PageMaker lacked. PageMaker and QuarkXPress were virtually equal , especially once PageMaker 5 added color seps, but momentum is hard to break, and QuarkXPress continued to gain market share, due largely to ignorance and mythology regarding PageMaker's capabilities. Most people who used both preferred PageMaker, but that didn't seem to help Aldus, and their dwindling revenues eventually led to their acquisition in 1995 by Adobe, which re-introduced PageMaker as Adobe PageMaker and subsequently upfated it to version 6, 6.5, and finally 7. However, it was quickly clear that Adobe had no real interest in PageMaker or its cusomers. Their interest lay in InDesign.