We can't open Pagemaker files if you delete older InDesign versions!

Bypassing any judgements as to the issue of availability of new installations of the CS6 version of InDesign, I want to echo the sentiments of others in terms of the need to keep document formats fairly current.

Adobe release InDesign 1.0 at the end of August 1999, nearly 20 years ago. Despite the release of PageMaker 7.0 in 2001, it was pretty clear to anyone other than a clueless, diehard PageMaker fan (and there were relatively few of those) that PageMaker was a dead end.

InDesign's capability to “open” PageMaker files was never intended to treat such old files with parity to native InDesign files. 20-20 hindsight would have had us not “open” PageMaker files, but rather have a separate “convert” function with a pop-up warning about the significant amount of manual reformatting and “fixing” needed to be done to make such converted documents function fully in InDesign since the document paradigm of InDesign was dramatically different than that of PageMaker, not to mention issues such as text encoding, layout, fonts, and placed graphics.

On these forums, frequent contributors (including a number of this thread) and Adobe employees have been consistent with the message that PageMaker content be converted sooner than later. For better or worse, there are no standalone PageMaker to InDesign conversion utilities available from Adobe or third parties that we are aware of (if you know of any, please speak up) and the ability to run the CS6 version of InDesign is increasingly problematic.

As such, I would most strongly encourage anyone with collections of PageMaker source files that they need for future reference to convert them to InDesign format as soon as possible before that capability totally goes away with whatever CS6 version of InDesign you can still round up!!! (And if you don't really need to further process such PageMaker files but want a final form version of same, consider finding an old MacOS 9 or Windows XP system capable of running PageMaker and creating PDF files from same!) You don't want to end up with lost content such as those who still have diskettes with old word processing documents in Wang WP or Wordstar formats!

          - Dov

If it is "just" the text that is important, LibreOffice can open .pm6 files.

While I have a perpetual license ID CS6, I've had varying success in the translation from PM to ID. The most important bits are there, just a bit scrambled. I just tried the LO routine and while each one opened in LibreOffice Draw successfully, they were more scrambled than ID (which were more usable with fixing). But all the text was present.

I do agree the routine should be added to CC. But if someone is willing to install PM7 using a virtual machine, Adobe ought to at least provide CC users a serial number.

Just as an update, I got a response from Adobe and they told me to email their customer service team, who would provide a license for CS6. Well, they told me that I needed to buy this license for $349 for one computer use. I asked them if they had any other means of opening Pagemaker files as CS6 is outdated (it was released in 2012 and was phased out by Adobe in 2015) and we wouldn't use it for any other reason except to open these files. Their response was nope, not gonna help me unless I dish out a ton of money for something I wouldn't use except for Pagemaker files. This is really disappointing.

Anyone else know any other programs that can open Pagemaker files?

Very, very good point! CS6 can still work, but with a serial license if you still have that, you need to have bought it. But for Cloud version users, indeed you have a ver good point!