DesignWorks 2.0c RELEASE NOTES ============================== Welcome to the DesignWorks 2.0c ReadMe file. This file contains any last minute information not in the manual. Designworks is now owned by Lazarus Engineering Corporation, We can be reached at: Lazarus Engineering Corporation 1827 Woodward Drive, Suite 110 Ottawa, Ontario K2C 0P9 Canada Voice: (613)226-6116 Fax: (613)226-3119 Email: lazarus@istar.ca Postscript and EPS ------------------ The Options Window ------------------ When any Postscript functions are called, a window is open querying the user as to how they would like certain aspects of the drawing handled. Firstly, the user can choose between colour and greyscale printing/exporting. Secondly, The user is asked asked how they want to handle any text in the drawing. In this the user has three options: - Using Postscript Fonts - Using one Postscript font - Rendering their Amiga fonts as bitmaps. If the given document does not contain any text objects, the text rendering options in this window are ghosted since they do not apply. Postscript Fonts ---------------- Both the "using one PS font" and "using PS fonts" options bring up a Postscript Font Requester. This requester allows the user to specify one (or more) Postscript fonts for their document. The font specified _must_ be already known to the Postscript Printer. No Postscript font information beyond the name of the font is passed to the printer. When in "using one PS font" mode, the selected Postscript font will be used across the entire document. When in "using PS fonts" mode, the requester will be brought up multiple times; once for each text object in the document. When in "using PS fonts" mode, the first few characters of the given text object will be shown in the requester. When in "using one PS font" mode, the first text object encountered by the Postscript engine will be shown. If the font desired by the user is not listed in the requester, it can be temporarily added by entering its name in the string gadget. Currently the exporter provides no facility for storing new font names. The "Text Attributes" checkboxes in the requester reflect the attributes of the given text object in the document and are not modifiable. Because of the lack of information about the Postscript fonts, internal support for centering, right justification, bold, underline and italic fonts is not supported. In order to print Postscript fonts out using italics, underline, or bold, the given attribute must be specified in the Postscript font name. (ie. "Jameston-Italic", providing this is a Postscript font known to your printer). Also, chosen Postscript fonts may have different size attributes than the Amiga fonts used in displaying the document. Thus, Text objects, when printed with Postscript fonts, maybe wider or narrower then with Bitmap fonts. Finally, baselines of the Postscript fonts were aligned to the baselines of the Amiga fonts but, because of the lack of Postscript font information, this may not be perfect, thus there may be some vertical displacement in printing. Fonts as Bitmaps ---------------- This option will render the standard Amiga font specified in each text object at 300x300 dpi and include it as a Postscript (masked) bitmap. Changes in 2.0a --------------- The operation of the "No Page Gaps" option in the page setup requester has been changed. It will now give you a page without horizontal or vertical margins. Anything towards the edge of the page will likely be trimmed when printing, depending on the target output device. A new layer option has been added to the Layers requester: Non-Printing layers. When a layer is nonprinting, it is visible on the screen, but will not be printed. This is handy for templates or other visual guides that are not part of the document. A new grid draw method has been added which will draw a single dot on every grid line. This is the first item in the grid patterns requester. This is also now the default grid draw mode. The EPS export module now will output fill patterns as they are on the screen instead of using an average fill colour. PostScript printing is now supported through the new eps export module. You can print PostScript to a printer to to a file from the Print requester. Two new ARexx commands have been added: NewLayer [HIDE] [NOPRINT] Will add a new layer to the current document with the specified name. Specifying HIDE will make the layer hidden and NOPRINT will make the layer non-printing. Units Will change the current measuring unit to the specified unit. Unit may be either INCH, or CM. Export did not put a slash in between a directory names and the filename. The ARexx command GetSelectedObject did not return anything in the result variable. The ARexx command NewLine did not generate the right lines. ARexx macros could not be run unless you had an active document. The ARexx command PenColor incorrectly set the current pen colour. The Drawing Size requester had problems with the maximum drawing size. Changes in 2.0b --------------- The Print ARexx command had a bug with setting the detail to normal. A new ARexx command has been added for printing PostScript: PrintPS [GRAY] If you want to send to the printer, use the filename PAR:. The GRAY option will print in grayscale. The Import ARexx command has been changed. It's new format is: Import and are the location of the imported file in points. and are the size of the imported file in points. Specifying 0 for width or height will set the value to the size of the imported bitmap. Filling of open polygons is now allowed. Setting the fill pattern of a text object will give the text a background pattern. Note: The fact that open polygons and text can have fills now may cause old documents to have fills where they previously were not. Select the offending objects and click on the "No Fill" tool under the Fill toolmenu. Some items in the Draw toolmenu were not properly deselected when another draw tool was selected. Deleting the current layer used to cause DesignWorks to crash unless you chose a new layer in the layer requester before clicking on DONE, even though the display showed another layer to be selected. Rotating of objects would toggle the grid snap status. Changes in 2.0c --------------- DR2D export now exports filled open polygons with a fill colour instead of unfilled. DR2D importing is now supported. CU Amiga Version ---------------- The manual chapter on Arexx Macros can be found in Macros.doc.