Paul Brainerd, founder of Aldus PageMaker, has died

I'd forgotten about PageMaker. I was on my college newspaper staff and we used it for layout.

It was a small college in the rural midwest, so the local newspaper ran our copies. They didn't use digital tools, so we printed our content from PageMaker and laid it out by hand on a wax board. [1]

RIP and many thanks for making our jobs easier. At least to the point we waxed the master layout.

[1]: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2009/05/dead-tech-waxers.h...

My dad still uses PageMaker to publish his print magazine. He's been using this program since 1987, starting with a Macintosh and then later moving to Windows in the late 1990s. RIP Paul Brainerd.

I never used PageMaker but I learned that we have it to thank for the classic institution of Lorem Ipsum.[1]

Thank you, sir.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

Wordstar and Pagemaker were two of my favorite programs from that golden era.

I can still see that black and white splash screen in my head. Computers were so magical back then.

Its worth noting that in retrospect PageMaker won the DTP wars of the 1990s.

Quark XPress was the industry leader in that period (most users had a love-hate relationship with it). There was also Ventura Publisher but that had the least market share.

Adobe acquired Aldus and PageMaker became an Adobe product.

Quark were thought of (and reportedly thought of themselves) to be invincible in their DTP software market penetration/moat. Sounds familiar?

Their pockets were deep enough then that they even offered to buy PagerMaker from Adobe ... to bury it.

Instead, Adobe released InDesign and while a rewrite, it is clear to anyone who used PageMaker that the whole UX and ways of working was/were taken 1:1 from PageMaker, not XPress.

This was quite a daring move. Adobe didn't have the standing yet in DTP to know if people would switch.

Especially since there were many software companies who had built an ecosystem of XPress plugins (very similar to the ecosystem if plugins that cemented Photoshop and later AfterEffect's positions as industry standards in image editing and motion graphics). And for which Adobe wouldn't have a competing offer when InDesign shipped initially; and likely for years to come.

On the other hand, XPress was known for being unstable to the degree of being a PITA to work with. Even people who much preferred its UX over PageMaker were aware.

Still, I recall XPress users mocking InDesign and saying it would go nowhere.

Within a few years though, PageMaker's spiritual successor proved them wrong.

Sadly InDesign is now a joke.

Six years ago I had to use it for something simple like exporting 500 letter template instances to a single PDF for printing (where each letter gets the address/addressee replaced).

It couldn't do it. It would crash every time. I found bug reports and forum threads from years ago where people complained about this.

I managed to eventually export it as 'PDF for Web' as I found a reddit thread were someone noted this was hitting an entirely different PDF export code path.

In short, today, without serious competition for years, InDesign is just a cash cow for Adobe. Getting as much love as Quark XPress did, before its eventual demise.

Getting seed funding from Fluke is a very PNW detail. RIP to a founder from a different age.

RIP. I was a big user of Pagemaker back in the early 1990s. Great product for the time.

A link to the original article seems like it would have been more appropriate: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/pagemaker-pioneer-paul-brainer...

I used the original Windows version of PageMaker for a long time, and also Ventura Publisher. It was more programmable and I ended up using it with a Paradox database to create a publishing system that created catalogs for dog shows for a local person who put them on. It create a couple hundred page book that would be professionally published for a weekend show. It had to be done every few months or so.

I used PageMaker to create a newsletter for the local Star Trek club which is how I met my wife.

Desktop publishing was my first career and a very happy memory for me. PageMaker4 and QuarkExpress were my tools but if I needed to put something together quickly I would always use PageMaker.

Later on, used InDesign to write my MBA papers cause I had lots of charts and graphs and wanted explicit control of the page.

Thanks Mr Brainerd for sparking a lifelong interest, may you rest in peace.

For many years since 1997, I would brag and boast about Adobe PageMaker, and everyone would look at me funny and tell me "it doesn't exist". I would insist it did. I used it for web publishing. It was fast. No cruft. It had FTP client built in (which was a little new at the time). It had ability to change file paths in HTML if the file was renamed or saved as something else.

I still have a dusty old XP box here with PageMaker 7 on it.

As long as you don't need transparency effects it's still plenty capable.

I used to use it with an Agfa Accuset imagesetter - and in that role it was more capable than InDesign, since it exposed all the options in the PPD, whereas InDesign would expose only a subset.

I used a pirate copy of it to lay out a group newspaper project for English class in the early 90s. Our teacher gave me an A and the rest of the group a B. It was alot of fun learning to use it.

Not only a tech pioneer, also a genuinely decent human who helped found Social Venture Partners and IslandWood here in the puget sound. He will be missed, but not forgotten.

I was fortunate to work for and with him during his philanthropic career. He was every bit as influential, far-sighted, and effective in doing good as he was in building software.

When he sold Aldus, he pocketed around $100M. The very first thing he did, literally that same year, was to found the Brainerd Foundation and put $40M into its endowment. (It's since full spent out and wound down operations in 2021.)

I'll say it again: THE FIRST THING HE DID WITH HIS WINDFALL WAS TO GIVE NEARLY HALF OF IT AWAY. (And he still had plenty -- and he would ultimately give a lot of that money too!)

Imagine if all of the tech billionaires who would follow in his footsteps had taken that as their north star.

He was a giant. We would all do well to emulate his intellect, his vision, his decency, and his generosity.

PageMaker was an iconic program of the DTP revolution for me, along with the Aldus logo. We couldn't afford a Mac at the time, so I made cargo-cult copies of programs like this on my home computer, and pored over the screenshots I saw in magazines. Years later, my Mum got a job in her office producing the in-house company magazine using PageMaker. I spent hours getting to know it while helping her out.

fug. he had a cool name tho

Died Sunday? Sunday two weeks ago.

Source: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/pagemaker-pioneer-paul-brainer... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145777)