Help with synchronizing two text blocks in PageMaker

May 20, 2007 3:23 PM

I have been writing books in PageMaker 7. With some projects I like to put "factoid" type material (quotes, facts, minor tables, etc) in the margins. Unfortunately I've never found a way of binding these with the main body of text so that factoid text blocks will be forced to appear on the same page. So I've been doing it manually, and it's a big PITA. How should I be handling this? Will Quark or newer versions of PageMaker help?
posted by rolypolyman to media & arts (7 comments total)

There are no newer versions of Pagemaker. The software is unsupported and EOLd. You want to use Indesign, which will be a far easier transition than using Quark (and, as someone who used Quark for 10 years before switching to IDCS, a far superior product for bookmaking, especially if typography is a concern).

By margins, I assume you mean on the page but outside the main text block?

What happens when you impose / bookletize your books? If text crosses the central margin, then yes, I can see that would be a problem. You can use a larger page, though, and do your imposition as part of the document setup.

Email me for more help if you like.
posted by luriete at 3:41 PM on May 20, 2007

I think you can do this in LaTeX with the \marginpar{} environment (just put it in the text you want it to travel with), so that's something to consider if you're thinking about switching software. Might be too annoying in other ways, though.
posted by grobstein at 3:44 PM on May 20, 2007

Are you aware of the Adobe Pagemaker Forum?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:03 PM on May 20, 2007

Oh, what I mean was, the forum should be able to answer this question and any others you might have about Pagemaker.

But Indesign is much better at this.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:28 PM on May 20, 2007

I produced books in PageMaker 6, 6.5, and 7 for a while and one of the most frustrating limitations was that it couln't do what you're talking about -- my problem wastrying to find some way to automate footnotes so that they stay with the text they're annotating; I was not able to find any way to do it other than manually.

Apparently InDesign CS2 can handle footnotes (I only have up to version CS) so I would suggest checking that out as a possibility, though I don't know anything about how flexible the implementation is and whether it would allow you to do exactly what you're talking about. You can download a 30-day trial copy of the software from Adobe's site, though, if you want to try it out.

I am also only semi-familiar with Framemaker, but it does do footnotes natively and I believe can handle what you're talking about, though the versions that I've used (5.5 was the latest) were not as easy to use as Pagemaker or InDesign.
posted by camcgee at 5:15 PM on May 20, 2007

CS, CS2 and CS3 all handle footnotes just fine. They can be in the endmatter, at the bottom of the page, or elsewhere (sidebars, for example, in CS2 and CS3). Framemaker is a decent app but almost all of its long-document and text formatting advantages (GREP etc) have been rolled into Indesign.

It's also far easier to learn Indesign when you've been a Pagemaker user, as opposed to moving to Quark.

Plus, I'll be you that Quark won't last more than one more revision before it disappears. Of all my magazine, academic and other book publishing clients and colleagues, three-quarters are using ID, and the few using Quark are just stuck with it due to legacy issues in their businesses; they all wish they were working with ID.
posted by luriete at 5:38 PM on May 20, 2007

If you are laying out a book that is at all long or technical, what you want is FrameMaker. It will do this without breaking a sweat. If I remember correctly (I'm a bit rusty, as I haven't used Frame at my last few jobs) you create an "anchored frame" that is attached to a certain point in the main text frame. As you insert or delete text, the anchored frame moves along with it. You can even influence to some degree the behavior of anchored frames when they are at the extreme top or extreme bottom of the page, again IIRC -- does it get pushed to the next page or does it squeeze upward on the page that contains the anchor, that sort of thing.
posted by kindall at 7:50 PM on May 20, 2007