So I have been doing this since 1992, and yes, that was the standard. I have CS3 now, soon to be updated to CS6, from what I hear. Problem is all those Pagemaker files. And they are a ton of the forms we use, and god only knows what else. I know I can open them and resave them in ID, but is there a wholesale way to do that? I don’t have the time to open each one in Page, look at it to decide if it needs keeping, then print it to be sure that when it morphs into ID, it’s the same. I have the Page discs, but of course, there are no ports anywhere for floppies. And the co. is balking at spending the $$ on a Page disc (which I am surprised to find even exists) since they don’t think I really need it. Is there someway to copy the floppies onto disc? Our computer guy is our accountant who does the computer stuff part time, and since he’s the bean counter, cost is his main metric. Honestly, that’s over 10 years of documents!
First of all, which platform - Mac or Windows?
Windows. The whole company is Windows, they refuse Mac.
Sorry, I won’t be of much help then.
Although, I will say that if you can find a working floppy drive, it should be pretty trivial to copy all your data to a USB flash drive, or DVD or external hard drive.
I’m pretty sure InDesign will open old Pagemaker files.
Is your data on floppies, or did you mention floppies only because you have an old copy of Pagemaker on floppy discs but no way to install it?
If it’s just the latter, the floppy disc issue may be a red herring. A version of Pagemaker so old it came on floppies might not even be installable on a current Windows system.
As I understand your question: You have a large number of files created by Pagemaker on a hard drive, and you want to convert them in bulk to a more modern format. Right?
I suspect the solution is to first determine which program can open your files (InDesign?) then look into scripting it using Windows Script Host.
Yes, ID can open the files, but one at a time, and when opened, there is a pop up warning that the values may have changed. So one at a time, I have to open the Page files, determine if I need it, print it, and then open it in ID. Which is not quick. So with hundreds of Page files, I would be at it quite a while, just converting them, then they would all need to be proofed.
The accountant/ computer guy says he has Page update floppies. But at least, they’re finally agreeing that they can’t expect the above.
And I am getting a little testy since I have found Page discs on the net for the whopping sum of $150 and less. Hell, I’ll just buy the damn thing.