'Getting You Started' guide to
Pagemaker 6.5

Section 9 Saving space

Saving space

PageMaker files can be very large, and take up a lot of room on disk. If the files are wholly, or mainly text, space can be saved by keeping the files as a template and a text file.

Template

A template is really just an ordinary PageMaker file, but normally contains no text at all, or just the blueprint for some text, such as a proforma. It has a file extension of .t65, and when opened, PageMaker automatically opens a copy, instead of the original, so that the template is not inadvertently overwritten.

To create a template:

Open a new file, or use an existing PageMaker file which contains all the paragraph styles, columns etc. that you want. Delete all the text that you don't want, and create or alter any parameters you want to appear in the template. Click on 'File', 'Save As' and then 'Save As Type - Template', before saving under the name you have chosen.

To use an existing template:

Use the same procedure as for opening an ordinary PageMaker file. If you select a .t65 file, a copy is automatically opened, which will be untitled. To modify the template itself, click on the 'original' button before opening.

Text files

Saving the text from a PageMaker document in text form takes up much less space on disk. The price you pay is that it may take a little time to recreate the document in its original form. If the document contains a substantial number of graphics images and/or several different stories, it is probably not worth it. You can only save a single story at a time as a text file.

To save the text from a document:

With the 'Text' tool, click anywhere in the story you want to save. Select 'File', 'Export' and 'Text'. When the dialogue box appears, choose the format in which you want to save the text.

Retrieving documents

If a document has been saved in this way, and you wish to retrieve it, first 'open' the appropriate template, if there is one. Then select 'File', 'Place' and choose the text file to import. If tags have been exported, click on the 'Read tags' box to retrieve the style names. (Data on the styles will be in the template.) Proceed to place the text as usual.

Exercise

Select one of your existing .p65 files which contains only or mainly text. Make sure that all text is assigned a paragraph style. (Text that has no special attributes can be styled as 'Body Text'.)

Export the text to a .txt file under a new name in 'text-only' format, making sure you fill in the 'Export tags' box.

Then delete all the text from the original document, and save what's left (page set-up and paragraph styles) as a template (.t65 file).

NB : Use 'Save As..' and not 'Save', otherwise you will overwrite the original .p65 file.

Close the file, and now try to reconstruct the original document from the template and the text file. ('Open' the template and 'Place' the text.)

Links

When a graphics file has been imported into PageMaker, a copy of the file is normally kept within the PageMaker document. If you are also keeping the original graphics file on disc, this means that a lot of disc space is taken up with two copies of the same thing. For large bitmap files this can represent a substantial amount of space.

To avoid this, we can tell PageMaker not to keep a copy of the file within the document, but to refer to the original graphics file. To do this, from the 'File' menu, select 'Links Manager'. A dialogue box will appear listing all imported objects:

Now simply deselect the 'Store copy in publication' box and click 'OK'.

NB: Not all types of object can be linked in this way.