Aldus opens door to PageMaker additions; developers conference to be held April 3-5 in Seattle. (The Latest Word)

Aldus opens door to

PageMaker Additions Aldus has announced plant to extend accessibility to PageMaker's internal action routines and publication data through what are tentatively called Additions. Addressing the same demand as Quark Xpress Xtensions and Letraset Design Studio Annexes, these Additions will allow users to write scripts, programmers to write plug-in modules and other programs to access PageMaker through Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) under Windows on the PC and through AppleEvents in System 7's Interapplication Communication (IAC) on the Macintosh.

The effects of this "new technology" are twofold. Aldus will give Mac and PC users of of PageMaker the power to automate page production. It will also give users of word processors, spreadsheets and databases PageMaker-quality composition.

The second scenario works like this: a word processor document gets fed to PageMaker, where it is composed automatically by a script command and then sent to a printer. PageMaker's composition information does not get fed back into the word processor.

Although this open system functionality is months from release, at first glance it appears to have done Quark and Letraset one better. Unlike vendors such as Quark that …