[scribus] New Linux User -- Scribus in place of PageMaker 6?

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 10 Aug 2008 01:33:52 +0100
John Beardmore <John at T4sLtd.co.uk> dijo:

> The best gateway would have been for Adobe to make InDesign import P65 
> files properly. Not a happy experience !

I lived through that era laying out textbooks. There were many problems
that made it impossible for InDesign to import PageMaker well.

Adobe bought PageMaker from Aldus corporation. Most think the reason
was to put it out of business as a competitor to InDesign, which was on
the drawing boards at the time. While that was a consideration, the
real reason was that Adobe wanted to include a lot of the look and feel
of PageMaker into InDesign. The reason for this was to woo PageMaker
users. But you can't just recreate a look and feel even if your code is
completely different - copying a look and feel is copyright
infringement.

When Adobe obtained PageMaker they also obtained the existing staff,
including programmers. However, not all of the Aldus programmers stayed
on. Adobe found themselves with few of the original PageMaker coders.
Worse, the PageMaker code was cobbled together with upgrades pasted on
top of upgrades. Back in the day when PageMaker was created it never
occurred to anyone to make program code modular so you can change a
part of it without affecting the rest of it. PageMaker was a monolithic
code creature. And when Adobe looked at the code they had bought they
discovered that they could not figure it out. Moreover, since a lot of
the code staff did not move to Adobe, they were left with no way to
figure it out. Today there is no one at Adobe who understands all of
PageMaker code. And the result is that getting InDesign to import
PageMaker docs is no easier for Adobe than it is for competitors.