DESKTOP PUBLISHING UPDATE


	   GOLD DISK/PAGESETTER/LASERSCRIPT/PROFESSIONAL PAGE

  Reviews of other Desktop Publishing packages are actively solicited!


     Things are moving very rapidly on the Amiga Desktop Publishing front,
  and this article is an attempt to keep both you and me up to date.

     The big news is the imminent release of "PROFESSIONAL PAGE" by Gold
  Disk, those fine people who brought us PAGESETTER, which is currently
  the Amiga's best offering in DTP - though I haven't yet seen "SHAKESPEARE",
  a package just released in the States. For those new to DTP, I would
  recommend a quick browse through the appropriate articles in Megadisc 1
  & 2 & 3, but here's a quick recap.

     Pagesetter is a low-cost, high-quality program which allows you to do
  most of what is currently possible on the very best DTP systems, which
  means: Apple MACs with Ready,Set,Go or PageMaker, or
	 IBM/compatible AT's with Ventura Publisher.
  Pagesetter is easy to use, easy to learn, and its presentation and style
  of use will be followed by Professional Page when it appears, meaning
  that you won't have to relearn the program. For non-laser-printed output,
  Pagesetter is very flexible, will allow the use of any fonts for the
  Amiga, including public domain, Zuma Fonts, Calligrapher fonts and others.
  Many people are using it for local newsletters, forms, and other
  documents output on a good dot-matrix printer. Practically any printer
  can be accessed by Pagesetter, from desktop jobs right up to Laser
  Typesetters like the Linotronic Series (100 and 300).

     If you purchase the LASERSCRIPT companion disk to Pagesetter, you will
  be able to use POSTSCRIPT Laser printers with Pagesetter - such printers
  as the Apple Laserwriter (Plus), the Texas Instruments OMNILASER series,
  the QUME printers, the Mitsui Ricoh and others. Real Desktop Publishing
  starts with these printers and the Postscript Page Description Language,
  because the resolution available (300 X 300 dots per inch versus approx.
  72 dpi for the average dot-matrix) and the various manipulations of pages
  that are possible allow for a near-typeset quality in the output pages.
  If you intend to use a laser printer, you boot up with Laserscript as the
  system disk, so that the specially designed laser fonts in the fonts
  directory of that disk (Times, Helvetica, Courier and Symbol in 4 different
  font sizes 8, 12, 16, 24) are the ones you use in your documents. Note
  that if you try to print a document witn normal Amiga fonts they will
  appear at the low resolution of 72 dpi, not having been designed for
  the Postscript devices. I've done a lot of printing in this way using
  an Apple Laserwriter Plus and a Texas Instruments 2108, and the results
  have been excellent, and good enough for artwork/typesetting commissioned
  by printers. Note that Laserscript comes with a MAKEFONT utility which
  allows you to duplicate any laser typeface available in any size you like
  and use it for printing.

     The main drawback of Pagesetter is the way it handles graphics - as it
  stands, any graphic, whether constructed in the "Graphic Editor" or
  imported from a paint program like Deluxe Paint, will only print out
  at a resolution of 72 dpi, because it is a "bit-mapped image", ie, it
  is based on pixels. The printer output is chunky and jagged to say the
  least, and just not good enough for quality graphic output. The problem
  behind getting high-resolution graphic output on a Postscript Laser
  printer is constructing the graphic in a "structured" form. This means,
  for example, that a circle has to be described to the printer as a
  figure with a centre at a particular point and a radius so long, rather
  than in the normal way of a series of dots/pixels in a circle. This
  structured way of creating and describing graphics is the secret behind
  the ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR program on the Mac, which puts out such high res
  graphics. And this is what PROFESSIONAL PAGE will make possible, and
  rather more.

     In PROFESSIONAL PAGE (PP), there is a graphic editor which creates
  structured graphics, rather than pixel-oriented or object-oriented
  figures, meaning that all such graphics will appear in the resolution
  of the output device - 300 dpi for a normal laser printer up to 2,500
  dpi in the case of a Linotronic 300 typesetter. What's more, any IFF
  graphic imported from a "structured graphic" CAD program such as Aegis
  Draw or Draw Plus will also be output at high resolution. This is a very
  powerful capability, because you'll be able to create a very complex
  graphic in Draw, using all the powerful tools of that program and
  import the whole thing into PP, where you'll be able to resize it and
  combine it with typeset text. Furthermore, any graphic from an object-
  oriented program such as Deluxe Paint or in HAM mode (4096 colours) can
  be imported and its colours will be read by the program and translated
  into 16 gray scales, which is a lot! Such graphics will have near-photo-
  graphic quality. The icing on the cake is that Gold Disk is writing a
  module (available in a couple of months) which will allow for 4-colour
  separations. That is, your colour graphic page will be read by the
  program and 4 different scans will be read from the page corresponding
  to the magenta, cyan, yellow and black separations needed by printers
  to do full colour prints.

     These graphic capabilities will put PP and the Amiga in a class of
  their own - such tools are being developed for the Mac, it is true, but
  unless you have a Mac II with colour monitor at about $14,000, it will
  be just guesswork on a normal Mac to establish colours for the final
  artwork. And the combination of the DIGIVIEW digitiser with this DTP
  setup will mean that ANY image can be digitised as an IFF graphic,
  loaded into PP and output at up to 2500 dpi...in colour. Commercial
  artists and typesetters should beware, these are serious, low-cost tools.

     PP will have other beefed up capabilities - more typefaces will be
  available to take advantage of the 13 resident typefaces in the
  Laserwriter Plus, and others will be developed; there will supposedly
  be text wrap-around of graphics (which Pagesetter doesn't do); text
  will be entered straight onto the page. Having only had a couple of
  sessions with the Beta-version, I'll have to wait and see what else is
  possible. But all the signs point to a quantum leap in productivity on
  the Amiga in this particular area, just as other areas of application are
  rapidly developing a professional level of usefulness, in for example
  Animation and Music. The Gold Disk company is to be congratulated on
  their efforts to turn the Amiga into a professional productivity tool -
  and I'm sure their efforts will continue as people realise the power
  of their products.

     One drawback with Prof. Page is the use of the hi-res interlace
  screen - it flickers quite a lot. This can be reduced significantly
  by changing brightness & contrast on your monitor, and/or getting a long-
  persistence monitor, and/or getting a screen for your screen (a slab
  of plastic will do - see MD3).

     For some information about using Laser Printers, see HINTS&TIPS.
  Likewise if you want details of how to make a serial cable to link up
  with an Apple Laserwriter from Pagesetter.

						  by Tim Strachan

		    END OF DESKTOPPUB