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techfreak85

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jan 13, 2008
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so my grandma has an old ibook she has been using for as long as i can remember. she is using os 9.2 and pagemaker for making her church bulletins/index cards/program handouts/reminders/ etc, and she has been wanting to upgrade to something newer. the main thing i am worried about is finding an easy upgrade from pagemaker(i know, i know, it is ancient but i have been begging for her to upgrade for years). Pagemaker is all she knows and it would be a stretch for her (and me for that matter) for her to learn(and for me to have to teach her) anything drastically different. i dont want to have to spend 800 bucks for indesign, and plus its overkill for her in my opinion. she just likes to do simple layouts. so if anyone has any ideas about what might help, id be glad to hear.
thanks
 
Maybe you should convince her to invest in a Unibody. It might seem a little too expensive but it should last a good 8 years for basic use.
 
Frankly if she has absolutely no problems with her current setup... I think you should let it remain that way.

From personal experience... old people really have a lot of problems absorbing new stuff and they dont want to most of the time....
This is of course generalized... I have no idea about your granny..
 
.... the main thing i am worried about is finding an easy upgrade from pagemaker(i know, i know, it is ancient but i have been begging for her to upgrade for years). Pagemaker is all she knows ...
You have conflicting goals, but it is not clear that any of your goals are to help your grandmother. There is no easy upgrade. Your grandmother has decades of old layouts in PageMaker format. IIRC, Adobe includes some PageMaker compatibility facilities within InDesign, but no other developer does. You have already decided that you don't want to fork over the Benjamins for ID. Without either PageMaker or InDesign, your grandmother would be forced to recreate from scratch layouts that she had developed over decades. To add to her woes, she would have to do it quickly in an unfamiliar computing environment.

Like others on this forum, I don't know your grandmother. For all I know, she may be a whiz. However, the fact that she has stuck with the familiar for lo these many years is strong evidence that MacOS 9.2 and PageMaker meet her requirements. I seriously doubt that she feels the need to change.
 
Pagemaker To Indesign

My office converted from PageMaker to InDesign about 4 years ago and we were all reluctant but pleasently surprised. First of all most of her files should convert OK since InDesign has the capability to bring up her old files. However we are still finding certain files come up very scrambled. Mostly forms. We used the paragraph rules quite a lot and they don' convert well at all. The woman who created them still has to open them in PageMaker. Also I don't think granny can convert older (than PageMaker 7.0) files.


If anyone knows of a 3rd party software that can convert PageMaker files I would be interested too!
 
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