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 (5 answers total)

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

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