🚀 go-pugleaf

Gabe,

PageMaker is "Publishing for the Rest of Us" in a very literal way.
The "Rest of Us", in this case, is all those who know nothing about
typography. It tries to provide as much automation as possible because
Mac users or PageMaker users are not necessarily typographers.

For more typographic control, people seem to prefer Quark XPress. I
don't remember if this finer control is more automatic than PageMaker's
or not.  I do know that, at least manually, XPress offers finer
typographic controls.

This touches on the big gap in low-end electronic publishing. WYSIWYG
vs WYGIWYW or WYGIWYSH (What You Get Is What You Want or What You Get
Is What You Should Have). LaTeX is a good example of this latter
approach to publishing, where what amounts to an expert system places
the elements of your publication into a harmonious whole. Unfortunately, 
the user interface to LaTeX is a throw-back to the 70's.

In any professional TRADITIONAL publishing house, it is very rare to
have the writers do the typesetting. At best, this results in much
wasted time and energy.

If you can find a copy of Leslie Lamport's "LaTeX User's Guide and
Reference Manual", the first several chapters make a good read. In the
first chapter, he describes LaTeX as the typographic designer and
Donald Knuth's TeX as the typesetter. Lamport makes the distinction
between logical design and visual design and why logical design--the
LaTeX method--produces consistently better output than visual design--
the WYSIWYG method.

I first became aware of TeX probably 10 years ago. Since I had no
access to "good" printers and since it involved learning another
programming language, I paid it not much more than passing interest.
When the Mac came along, and the LaserWriter, suddenly typographic
issues seemed to be more immediate. One of the first things I noticed
was all these "Power To Be Your Worst" documents people were PROUDLY
foisting on anyone who would read them.

I know this response has strayed quite far from your original query and
I have managed to turn it into a personal flame, but what the Mac needs
is a program as powerful and intelligent as LaTeX, with the ease of use
of a Mac WYSIWYG word processor. A DESIGNER knows when something should
be in bold face or italic. A writer only knows that it's the title of a
publication or a subheading for a chapter.

I look forward to the day when my favorite expert system typesetting
program will have plug-in modules for various "designer looks". To the
person or company who has the vision to develop such a system and the
saavy to market it correctly, it could bust open a whole new market
into the next generation of word processing.

A catch-phrase? How about "Desktop Expert Design"? 
  Or just "E.D." for short.


  --scott
 
--
Scott Truesdell