PageMaker was awarded an SPA Excellence in Software Award for 'Best New Use of a Computer' in 1986. Aldus Pagemaker 1.2 for Macintosh was released in 1986 and added support for PostScript fonts built into LaserWriter Plus or downloaded to the memory of other output devices. 'BYTE' in 1989 listed PageMaker 3.0 as among the 'Distinction' winners of the BYTE Awards, stating that it 'is the program that showed many of us how to use the Macintosh to its full potential'.Īldus Pagemaker 1.0 was released in July 1985 for the Macintosh and in December 1986 for the IBM PC. The Windows version supports Windows XP, but according to Adobe, ' PageMaker 7.x does not install or run on Windows Vista.' It does not run well under Classic, and Adobe recommends that customers use an older Macintosh capable of booting into Mac OS 9. The Macintosh version runs only in Mac OS 9 or earlier there is no native support for Mac OS X, and it does not run on Intel-based Macs without SheepShaver. In 1994, Adobe Systems acquired Aldus and PageMaker. PageMaker relies on Adobe Systems' PostScript page description language. As an application relying on a graphical user interface, PageMaker helped to popularize the Macintosh platform and the Windows environment. PageMaker was one of the first desktop publishing programs, introduced in 1985 by Aldus, initially for the Apple Macintosh and, in 1987, for PCs running Windows 1.0. Version 3.01 was available for OS/2 and took extensive advantage of multithreading for improved user responsiveness. PageMaker 3.0 for the PC was shipped in May 1988 and required Windows 2.0, which was bundled as a run-time version. From 2005, these features were bundled into InDesign CS2, which was offered at half-price to existing PageMaker customers.Īldus Pagemaker 3 for Macintosh was shipped in April 1988. Adobe ceased all development of PageMaker in 2004 and 'strongly encouraged' users to migrate to InDesign, initially through special 'InDesign PageMaker Edition' and ' PageMaker Plug-in' versions, which added PageMaker's data merge, bullet, and numbering features to InDesign, and provided PageMaker-oriented help topics, complimentary Myriad Pro fonts, and templates.

The last major release of PageMaker was 7.0 in 2001, after which the product was seen as 'languishing on life support'.

Pagemaker definition