PAGESETTER REVIEW. By Russ Craig, Stephen Poulsen, and Garry Stasuik. NAG (Northwest Amiga Group) Portland, Oregon. From NAG RAG 02/87 to NODE 04/87. Pagesetter by Gold Disk, Inc., was reviewed by NAG members Russ Craig, Stephen Poulsen, and Garry Stasiuk. Each reviewer has been using Pagesetter for at least one month. Russ Craig wrote about the Novice SIG meeting for the NAG RAG and assembled his rough draft of his review using Pagesetter. Stephen Poulsen really put Pagesetter through its paces composing an entire newsletter, The SPELEOGRAPH, a Newsletter for the Oregon Grotto, a local Chapter of the National Speleographic Society. He also wrote his rough draft for the review to demonstrate Pagesetter with actual examples. Garry Stasiuk used Pagesetter to compose his WYSIWYGing column and construct this review. We all agreed that this review should be a demonstration of what Pagesetter can and can't do... by actually using the program to write the review. We also felt that we were handicapped by not having other AMIGA desktop publishing software with which to make comparisons. The reviewers met twice, to compare notes and verify bugs. At our first meeting we made a list of "bugs" and attempted to solve problems that each reviewer encountered using the program. We then discussed the bugs and problems with Ruth Pruitt, editor of the NAG RAG. Ruth acted as our go between. She called Gold Disk for us to verify our findings and obtain answers to our questions. We then met again... To speed up the process of writing the review and avoiding duplication of findings, Garry Stasiuk volunteered to edit and write the final review from the notes and material written by Russ Craig, Stephen Poulsen, and Garry Stasiuk. What is desktop publishing anyway? Using just your Amiga and a printer, a desktop publishing program should simplify the assembly of a single page or a multi-page newsletter, business report, catalogue, book, or any kind of document for that matter. It accomplishes this by eliminating the time consuming task of cutting, aligning and pasting-up your typeset text (which already presumes you have had your text typeset) and graphics. It should also eliminate the need for special typesetting machines or letter press tranfers for making titles and headers with 24 or 36 point letters (or larger). It should also eliminate the time consuming task of inking in or pasting down borders or boxes to highlight graphics, pictures and text. However, it should not eliminate your graphic artist... it should make the artist more productive! PageSetter Suggested retail price $149.00, but can be purchased locally for $119.95... Not copy protected. BRAVO!!! Includes PageSetter Master Disk and a User's Guide. You need a 512K Amiga with a single disk drive and an Epson compatible printer. However, the type style in the manual is tiny and hard to read... about 6 pt. type (it looks like 12 pt. type that has been photo-reduced). You would think that a company producing Desk Top Publishing software would know and do better. We all discovered that the quickest way to get into using PageSetter was to follow the tutorial chapter in the enclosed manual. We recommend that before you begin using the program - read the manual! However, (you can skip Chapter 5 as we think Chapter 5 was a Freudian slip that reveals the level of use that this program was intended. That is, - the "non-professional"). However, do not interpret this as meaning that the program lacks quality. PageSetter is a complex, well thought out, multi-screened, but easy to use program. When PageSetter opens after double clicking its icon, you will find a large beige coloured screen with a garbage can in the lower left corner. At the right side of the screen you will see a column of gadget boxes filled with various hieroglyphics. Pressing the right mouse button reveals five menus. They are Project, Department, Art Board, Page, Box, and Preferences. It is not until you select a menu that you discover that there are indeed keyboard short cuts (Right Amiga key + keyboard letter) that enable you to activate some menu choices... These choices should have been documented in the manual (perhaps in place of Chapter 5)!! Project/Rename Under the project menu is a feature called "Rename." As PageSetter is a memory intensive program, "Rename" allows you to name a document without bringing up the "Save as" requester which might use just enough memory to bring a visit from the GURU... (If you find yourself in an out of memory situation, PageSetter will save your document under the title of "Emergency.save") Nice feature! Department The department menu allows you to enter the "Text Editor", "Graphics Editor", or "Let's you print your document!" by choosing "Press". Department/Text Editor Selecting "Text Editor" from the "Department" menu takes you to a new screen. There is a scroll bar on the right and in the menu bar you read... PageSetter: Editor.......Line 0, Col 0, Insert.......... with front to back gadgets that take you to the work bench window and screen, but not to PageSetter's main screen. Pressing the right menu button reveals three menus. They are Project, Edit and Block. The default colours for this screen is black with white text. This choice makes the text you enter easy to read, and lengthy sessions less fatiguing to the eye. The "Text Editor" is a powerful and easy to use word processor with many features. Project/Text Editor/Project/Load Selecting "Load" from the Project menu reveals a sub-menu that allows you to import Generic (ascii files), or files directly from TextCraft or Scribble!! The "Editor" automatically converts the codes used for Underline, Italic, Bold, Paragraph, etc., in Textcraft and Scribble, to the "embedded" text enhancement codes used by PageSetter's "Editor". This feature works real well. Garry Stasiuk reported that the only slight problem with importing some files from TextCraft was discovering some hidden carriage returns and paragraph markers. But, these were easily fixed with PageSetter's "Editor." Stephen Poulsen writes of the embedded enhancement commands. "A handful of easy to remember commands which begin with a "backslash" character followed by "b" for bold text, "o" for outlined text, "i" for italics, or combinations thereof make it simple to create interesting and readable text." It would have been nice if these commands and other "Editor" keyboard short cuts were printed on a pull out page or card for quick reference. The list of formatting commands on page 4-2 of the manual is not complete. The end of paragraph command "Backslash p" is missing. If you are using justified mode for text, this command is v e r y n e c e s s a r y! As I was editing this document, I accidentally hit F10 instead of delete and discovered a new edit command! You can "over type" a word to replace it! What other hidden delights are there????? Editor/Project/Print When you select "Print" from the Editor's "Project" menu you will discover an extensive sub-menu that will allow you to change your printer's preferences without loading the preferences program from the workbench window (another memory saving short-cut)!!! If you have ever published a newsletter, or printed a lengthy document of any kind, you know that you will need someone else to proof read the text! One feature in the print sub-menu will allow text to be dumped directly to your printer. You can even choose double spacing -for easy editing. Another nice feature! Editor/Edit The "Editor's Edit" menu reveals requesters for finding and replacing text. The are requesters for changing the direction of "Search" and for re-toggling the "Replace" mode. You can choose "Mark" and it will "Mark" or remember the current location of the cursor in your document. Now you can continue moving through the document. When you want to return to your "Marked" postion, select "Exchange." You will automatically return to your previous position without having to scroll through the whole doc to find the spot. Now you can do your "edit" (block, cut and/or paste). The Text Editor works well and is an asset to the program. Using the mouse to change the position of the cursor sometimes triggers the block feature, but other than that there seem to be no major problems. Department/Graphic Editor Selecting "Graphic Editor" from the "Department" menu takes you to yet another screen. This screen appears blank, except for what looks like a calculator in the lower left corner. This is the "Graphics Editor" gadget selector. Each little box, filled with an hieroglyphic, allows you to select a drawing tool. The most important gadget in the "Graphic Editor" gadget box is the "Frame" gadget. You must "Frame" your graphic before you can paste it down on a page. Pressing the right mouse button reveals five menus: Project, Frame, Shades, Text, and Preferences. The entire PageSetter program runs in medium resolution 640 x 200 pixels. The Graphic Editor only supports black and white pictures with shades of gray represented by dot and line hatchings in different arrays. The manual states that any graphics imported to PageSetter should be in this resolution (Med-res) to reduce distortions by bringing in pictures from 320 x 200 (Lo-res) or 640 x 400 (Hi-res) resolution modes. Forget about trying to bring in graphics from Hi-res! PageSetter loads the graphic from Hi-res with each second line blank! We were able to import Lo-res pics with no problem and found that drawings made on Apple's Macintosh looked real good. These drawings are available from NAG disk #69 and some are on the NAG Bulletin Board. Clip-Art PageSetter incudes some "clip-art", however, we were not very impressed with the enclosed selection. The enclosed "clip-art" was at best primitive... Come on you guys, you spent a great deal of time and money producing a terrific program, and then you go and skimp on the "clip-art"! There must be a whole bunch of frozen and starving artists in Canada! Hire one!!! It's not too late to save a starving artist! Frame/Clip/(5:4 or 1:1) The "Frame" menu contains a very useful tool that allows you to clip your art so that when it is printed, the image will be corrected for distortion. The distortion is caused by the the difference between what you see on the screen (the pixels are not square) and how your printer interprets what is on the screen. A circle on the screen will be printed by your printer slightly elongated or oval in shape. PageSetter allows you to clip your art so that, "what you see on the screen -is what you will get from your printer." By selecting "Clip" from the "Frame" menu and "Scale 5:4" from "Clip's" sub-menu, you can paste down art that will not be distorted by the printer. (See figure 1. below). ____ ___ / \ / \ \____/ \___/ Cheap imitation of figure 1. BUG... Russ Craig was the first to find a rather serious bug in the "Graphic Editor." When selecting different modes from the "Text" menu, you also wind up toggling "Graphic Editor/Preference" menu choices! It was very disturbing to select from the "Text" menu, "Fg only" (Fore ground only), and a have the work bench window pop up. The gadget selector disappears when you choose "Fg + Bg" (Fore ground + Back ground). The coordinates turn off (or on) when you click on "compliment"... When Ruth called Gold Disk for us, they did not know that this bug existed! We felt quite resentful for being used as unsuspecting Beta-Testers!!! If you use Dpaint or Images as a graphics program, you will find PageSetter's "Graphics Editor" quite primitive, and frustrating. However, do take advantage of being able to adjust your graphic for distortion. You might find the (Fg + Bg) Text mode very useful for placing text into your art where the text overlaps the art and the background colour changes. Try the different embedded text commands. Garry Stasiuk noted that it took him awhile to realize that the entire graphics screen represents a page size that measures only 5.325 by 3.455 inches (31.95 by 20.729 picas). In other words, when you place a graphic on a page, it will be a lot smaller than you think... As a result if you want larger text, make it in one of the other IFF graphic programs and import it over to PageSetter. PageSetter/Art Board Returning to the main screen we find that the "Art-Board" menu lets you set ruler margins and grid size on the paste-up page. You can choose inches or picas (a pica is almost 1/6th of an inch and the manual states that as far as PageSetter is concerned a pica is 1/6th of an inch). The Nitty Gritty --Making a Page-- Page/Create When you choose "Page/Create" from The PageSetter main screen menu, you are beginning the creative process of "typesetting" a page. Selecting "Create" brings up a requester that allows you to choose Standard (U. S. Letter size) or a Legal sized page. There are two mysterious boxes marked A4 and A6... with no documentation as to what those choices stand for... we were told something vague about Canadian Standards (other than USA?) and you can read the strange page sizes below the page size gadgets (A4 = 8.25 x 11.694 and A6 = 8.25 x 6.000). You can type in exact page size if you so desire... from 1 x 2 inches up to legal size. Choosing "Page/Default" allows you to set the same format for every page. However, you cannot rotate or turn a page sideways. We were told that a professional version of PageSetter will include rotation. Rotation is an important feature if you want to typeset large newsletters or catalogues in standard book size -5.5 by 8.5 inches or 6 x 9 inches. It would also be terrific if future versions of Gold Disk's PageSetter included even larger page formats such as 11 x 17 or 17 x 22 inch pages. In the "Create" requester you can also choose page margins (top, left, right and bottom) and the number and size of the columns you want on the page. Once a page is created, you cannot delete it from the program. This "irksome" oversight was pointed out by Stephen Poulsen. Gold Disk told us this "oversight" will be corrected an up-dated PageSetter. When you click ok, a page appears on the screen. You are now ready to "pour" graphics and text on to the page... Boxes.... Boxes, we got boxes, small, large, overlapping... that's the secret that makes PageSetter so powerful, and so easy to work with. Any time you want to put text or a graphic on a page you either make a custom box or use the "auto-box" function. You also have to make a "Box" before you can activate the "Box" menu. To make a box, select the box gadget on the right hand side of the screen. Now drag your mouse across the page making the box any size you want. You can also place boxes on top of each other, or make them over lap. The boxes can be moved around on the page the same way you can move windows around on the work bench screen. You can draw a series of boxes on several different pages. By using the link gadget, the boxes can be joined together so that text poured into box "one" will spill over into box "two" on the next page, and if there is still text left over, it will spill into the "third" box... until you use up all your text... (to be continued on page ?) PageSetter/Box/Current Once you have made a box, and you have clicked on it once to "activate" it, you can choose the "Box" menu choice "Current" and set the following characteristics for the that box. Transparency: Toggles whether the box will be transparent or cast a shadow (you can hide text or part of a graphic by drawing a box on top of it) Justification: Set justification left, right, left and right, or centered. Margins: Set margins for text within the box (this helps keep the text away from any boarders you might draw around the box). Background: You can set Background colour ranging from white to black with total of 16 choices (if you want to use the reverse type option for a word you have to make the page beneath the reversed word opposite the colour of the text). Borders: Six choices, but nothing fancy. Border postions: Three choices, a box, column lines, and a line for the top and bottom of a column. Leading: Sets the separation between lines of text. Tracking: Sets the maximum letter separation for micro-justification in flush (left and right) justification of type. Fonts: Unfortunately this requester does not allow you to access another disk drive, it will only read what is in PageSetter's work bench font directory. To access fonts from NAG disk #59 or #68, before you boot up PageSetter, you will have to use the CLI and the assign command. (Assign fonts df1: fonts). We were disappointed that PageSetter did not include custom fonts. Or at least one font set in a complete range of sizes (8 point to 800 point). (Gold Disk's ad in AmigaWorld claimed "Point size capabilities to 800 pt.") A good newsletter needs to have at least a 24 or 36 point font for heading and titles. Large point sizes do not exist on standard Amiga work bench disks. Using the "Graphic Editor" to expand the size of a font for a title is not a satisfactory answer as fonts change characteristics when they are stretched. Boxes/Default You can set a default value for all the boxes, on every page. If you open a New Pagesetter program it will open with the programs original defaults. Gadgets To help you align boxes on a page, gadgets are available for turning on and off -rulers, grids, margins, and the outlines of the available boxes drawn on the page. The Pudding... You are now ready to place text and graphics into their boxes. This is how Stephen Poulsen describes the task. "Now go to PageSetter's "Text" or "Graphic Editor" and "bring back" a graphic or text to the layout page. If you are bringing in text, click the "write" gadget. Your pointer will turn into the pencil icon. Now click anywhere in the active box. Text will fill the box. If all the text from the Editor cannot be displayed in that box, "Chain" or "Link" the active box to another box and the "unused" text will spill over into the chained or linked box." "If you notice an error or want to change some text, make the box that contains the error the active box. Then click the "Edit" gadget. This takes you directly into the Text Editor along with the text you wish to change. This means you don't have to go back to your word processor, make the correction or change, save the doc, and then import it back into PageSetter." "If you bring back a graphic, click the "Paint" gadget, and your pointer will turn into a brush. To paste down the "clipped graphic" you are bringing back, click the brush anywhere in the active box. At the bottom of the gadget box on the right hand side of the screen are four compass arrows. These compass arrows are for adjusting the position of the graphic inside the box. That's all there is to it" Additional Features There are gadets for zooming in on a page to read text, or check for grammatical style or to examine a graphic. You can zoom out and see how the layout on the whole page appears. An additional gadget allows you to scroll around on the close-up page, as you can only see one-eighth of a page at a time in close-up mode. PageSetter:Preferences The "Preferences" menu allows you to change default colours for the paper, ink and grid lines. However, when you are ready to print your docs, the printer routine will force you change back to the default settings. (the page must be white and the ink black). (The Amiga Utility/Notepad forces you to do the same thing when you try to print the page as a graphic). Preferences/Quickmove When you toggle Preferences/Quickmove the current box only displays the outline of the box. When you are organizing a page this is a handy feature. Every time you move a box, the text is deleted from the box and then "poured" back in to the box after you have repositioned it... It is quite time consuming to wait for the text to get into place. The Preferences menu also allows you to toggle some memory management tools, that may save the day when you are working with a large document. However, as stated in the manual... save often... (Trust no one... ) Additional BUGS PageSetter comes with two extra sub-routines. A routine called PageIFF that allow you to save your PageSetter doc as an IFF graphic. And a routine called PagePrint, for printing your document without booting up the larger memory intensive PageSetter program. The PageIFF page saving routine does not work! If you have Dpaint or Images, the routine appears to work because these programs only show you the top part of a page. With Dpaint II you can load the whole page (width = 960 x height 792) pixels. The top 272 pixels are okay, but the rest of the page is a mess... The folks at Gold Disk knew this bug existed, yet they still included the faulty routine with the package!! However, I really hope they can get this routine to work, as it may be the only way to make ink jet printers compatable with PageSetter. The PagePrint routine is not reliable. It works some of the time. Stephen also pointed out that this routine stops after every page is printed with the prompt "Please set paper to top of form." So much for multi-tasking or taking a coffee break while your printer slaves away... There is also no abort printing gadget... either you let the page print out or you could ...ahem...soft-reboot...OH YUCK! We were informed Feb 5th/ '87 that PageIFF and PagePrint fixes will be posted on PLink and various BBS's as Public Domain programs. (Available at Amiga-America NOW) The proof of the pudding... printing PageSetter prints the document as a graphic. This is where we had the greatest difficulty with PageSetter. Russ Craig states, "Gold Disk suggests that for the best results you should have an Epson or an Epson compatible printer. It seems that this is essential since few other printers will work. I have had problems using the driver for my Panasonic KX-P1092 (white lines throughout the page and missing lines), yet the same printer works fine when using the standard Epson driver supplied with the program. Others in the group spent hours attempting to print with the HP Laser Jet-Plus and a Hewlett-Packard ink jet printer [with no success]." Stephen Poulsen uses a Star NX 10. He had problems until he reset line length in preferences to 255. Garry Stasiuk has a Canon 1080A, which simply does not work with PageSetter! However, his Brother M-1509, worked fine after setting page size in preferences to U. S. Letter. The manual states that you must set the following "attributes." "1). Black and White, 2) Aspect Horizontal, 3) the threshold value should be set to a value between the Paper and the Ink colour (for the default colours this should be set to 2)." There needs to be better support from Gold Disk (replace Chapter 5 ?) on procedures needed to properly set up different printers. Working on this problem, it became apparent that the "User's Guide" really needs an INDEX... A real index! Gold Disk informed us they are working on a Postscript program to support laser printers. However, we hope they continue working on supporting ink jet and dot matrix printers. The obvious print driver problems should have been solved by Gold Disk, before they released PageSetter. They have promised a free "fixed" version. But, is that really good enough? Stephen Poulsen speaks I have had no experience with typesetting programs on other computers. The idea of owning one was very compelling, as I spent a lot of personal time pasting up The Speleograph. Just the thought of throwing out the light table and the waxer was enough to make me want to purchase this program. What I Liked... Now that I have used this program, I can tell you what I really liked. I liked the Quicktext Editor, and the ease of using the fuller Text Editor with its embedded commands. To be able to click a box and highlight or fix a word is great! I also liked PageSetter because it was easy to work with. It is easy to import a large choice of fonts and graphics into the program. I also liked the fact that it worked so well with TextCraft There was absolutley no problem in porting TextCraft files into PageSetter. What I Didn't Like... Can't rearrange pages so that you can read them in linear order for flow and continuity. Can't delete a page! Takes a fairly long time to print a page. Can't print a multi-paged manuscript all at once. The program prompts you to make sure the printer is set correctly for each page. Recommendations... Reasonably priced for non-profit organizations and small groups and clubs. Ideal for a church newsletter. The final document looks okay, but it is not as "nice" or professional as it could be. Not every one has access to a laser printer. However, if you want to eliminate the paste up process, and save time, the price is quite reasonable. Russ Craig Speaks... I felt somewhat handicapped, as there are no other desk top publishing programs available for comparison. However, it was not difficult to get into the program, and begin to get a feel for what it can do. The tutorial worked real well in helping us get our feet wet. What I Liked... Flexibility. Not overly priced. The box system is real nice to work with as it gives you real good control of what is going on, both on and off of a page. I really enjoyed bringing in some art from Apple's Macintosh. NAG disk #69 has a "MacView" program for converting Mac pics to IFF format. What I Disliked... The program needs to be made more responsive to the IFF format. It was most disturbing to discover undocumented bugs, especially with the menu problem in the Graphic Editor. The User's Guide needs to have a real index. The Tutorial chapter and the reference section were real helpful. However, Chapter 5, is not useful and gives away the fact that this program is being marketed to entry level desk top publishing users. They could have used those eleven pages to deal with detailed printer set up, and documention of known bugs. Recommendations... I expected the program to deliver a more professional looking document. However, PageSetter is not overly priced. That makes it reachable for small organizations. With bug fixes and better printer support, this program could be a winner. Garry Stasiuk speaks.... I first saw PageSetter at a dealer. We tried print the enclosed sample page on an Okimate 20, but, ran into the line skip problem. Switching to an Epson compaptable Citizen printer we were able to print out the doc ok. I was not too impressed with the "look" of the doc printed by the dot matrix printer. The Okimate print out on the other hand looked real sharp and crisp, except for the missing lines and line skips. I was really hoping that I could use my Canon 1080A, as I knew that it prints out real sharp, detailed graphics... so far I have been real disappointed. I was also disappointed that PageSetter didn't include a complete font set. A set that goes beyond what is available from Work Bench... The 8 pt. font gives a page a real cluttered look. The 12 pt fonts, Ruby and Diamond look okay, but they are too big and use up valuable space. As a result, I spent a week-end chopping down the 12 point Diamond font to a 10 pt. The 10pt. font makes a page look much better. I was expecting a more professional looking final document, and was real disappointed when told that the professional version is yet to come... Even with it's problems and limitations, I have enjoyed working with this program. If the people at Gold Disk follow through with the bug fixes, and do their home work and fix the printer driver problems, PageSetter will be a powerful tool in the Amiga community. If you are planning on buying this program, wait for the fixes. Or, be sure your printer will work with the program. However, the real proof of the pudding is in front of you. Look at the NAG RAG! What do you think?