CITY DESK 2.0 FINALLY HERE by Rod McCallum GET A LASER PRINTER... Before we look at this package in more detail let's get one thing straight. The quality of your work demands a laser printer that can output material with at least 300 dots per inch resolution. Any printer that uses a ribbon can't compete with the actual typeset quality delivered by a laser. Neither a 9 pin or 24 pin dot matrix is good enough. It may get close, but we are talking about work you will SELL from your DTP Bureau. So don't make believe. Get the real thing. Of course, if you are only setting the weekly newsletter for the Budgerigar Breeders Association, and the President happens to be yourself, then dot matrix is fine, and you'll find that City Desk does an excellent job, within the limits of the printer. But the real thing could be expensive. A postscript laser has a great range of typefaces at your fingertips. "City Desk", for instance, can access the following, and in any size:- Avant Garde, Bookman, Century, Courier, Helvetica, Palatino, Times, Zapf Chancery, and Symbol. Cost of a postscript laser is $6,000 and upwards. I use an Okidata laserprinter that I paid $2,900 in June, 1988. It carries the Commodore label as LP806. As is so often the case, after a while, Commodore slashes the price. You can now buy one for $1,900! Such is life! But this laser has several useful fonts, including Times, Helvetica, Courier and Lineprinter built in. It can also accept cartridge fonts and "soft" fonts that you can download from software into your printer. That is, if your DTP software has the facility to do this. City Desk has the facility to download soft fonts and, in the Version 2.0, includes a face called CMR, which looks very much like a Century Medium, in 12 point, 12 point bold, 12 point italic and 18 point bold. I use this face in my monthly publication the "Encounter Coast Report". It is an excellent face and adds to my range of type available. NEW TEXT EDITOR Version 2.0 of City Desk is a 'Mercedes Benz' version of the former 'Kingswood' Version 1. Biggest applause probably goes to the text editor. It is now a full screen effort, and, in use, is very much like Scribble. In fact, you could use it like a word processor, cut, copy, paste, search/replace, edit and save your files. Then format the document any way you like on the City Desk page. GRAPHICS EDITOR The graphics editor is just like a junior Deluxe Paint. Easy to use, easy to learn, and allowing you to "paint" in 16 shades of grey, black and white. You cut the finished effort as a brush and paste it where you want it, using the sizing tool to increase/decrease etc., just as you wish. Further, if you have the memory, you can multitask DPaint with City Desk, giving the best of both worlds. I don't like making boxes and then filling them with type. It is cumbersome. For my publication I set three columns to a page, each column 2 inches wide, space between columns is 12 points. No more box-creating problems from then on. I pour type in from my word processor and it fills column after column, page after page, until it is all in place. If I wish, I can take a paragraph and stretch it across two or three columns. For example, I can re-set my first paragraph in 12 point CMR bold and stretch it across two columns instead of just one. The rest of my article continues in 10 point Times, in single columns. A click, and the whole article re-flows into the new format. Box construction sets? Who needs them! FLOW-AROUND GRAPHICS A graphic could be imported. Let's make it a football. We'll drop it onto the page so it straddles two columns. Use the resizing tool to get it to the size you want, then re-flow the text around it. Now, just about every DTP package I've seen can do this easily, but it treats the football as if it were square. City Desk can handle irregular shapes easily and when the type reflows, it follows the contour of the ball. Really professional! HYPHENATION Type can look better if it is hyphenated, particularly a long word like "hyphenated" that is sitting in a fully justified column. It could split from one line to another as "hy-phenated", or "hyphen-ated". City Desk can do this for you, checking every w ord automatically, for your entire document. Sometimes a headline would carry more effect if it were set on a stippled background, or reversed, white text on black background. It's easy. Stipples can be controlled in 5 % increments from lightest gray to solid black. Screen display can be seen with up to 6 times magnification and the display fills the screen, making editing easy. All through this program there are features that allow you to give the professional touch to the work you do. There are 4 discs to City Desk. The program disc. A laserfonts utility disc that allows you to download softfonts. A disc to allow hard disc installation. And a fourth that has a disc handling utility plus a selection of soft fonts as mentioned above, plus a 24 pin dot matrix face called "Unity" that has 6,10,12,18 and 72 point fonts. As a result of a previous article I wrote on DTP, published in Megadisc, Bill Sharpe-Smith in Perth made contact with me. Telecom has made a fortune out of this encounter. Bill invested in the Okidata Laser, has also received his City Desk, and is using it to produce "Augment" the magazine of the Amiga Users Group W.A. Bill agrees with me, that this program knocks the spots off others in its price range. While Pagestream has promise, it is painfully slow and still has glitches. City Desk is fast, feature-packed and friendly for the Postscript printer, HP laser, or dot matrix printer. THE MANUAL The manual is very good, in ring-bound covers and well set-out. A raw beginner should have little problem getting air-borne. It gives a good tutorial and explains how to use macro commands and other formatting ideas very simply. I use it constantly and have explored most of its potential. I am still impressed with it and would use this program in preference to any other. If you are into DTP, get it. It will make your day!