WELCOME TO THE PAGESTREAM 3.3 Alpha6 UPDATE! July 16, 1997 ============================================================ Choose Scripts/View ReadMe.Now to read this from within PageStream3. (Requires ARexx.) Welcome to PageStream 3.3! First, PageStream3.3 Amiga is just about "beta". We have a few features to finish, but most of the work is done on the new features. We still have much to do with testing and fixing bugs I'm sure, but we have been using this version in house so its pretty far along. How much? For PageStream 3.2 owners, the upgrade price will be $50. That includes a brand new manual and all the features mentioned below. For 3.0/3.1 users, the upgrade price is $85. What about the a manual? If you purchased a copy of PageStream3 without a manual and your entitled to a manual, you can knock $10 off the upgrade price or just get the manual at no cost without upgrading. If you didn't get a manual and your _not_ entitled to a manual, you can just purchase the manual for $10 (but we would prefer to sell you the upgrade!). When? How about real soon now? We are terrible at giving dates, so I won't bother now! We are going to try something new. If you purchase the upgrade in advance, we will provide you with a secure ftp site name and password to allow you to download a full _non_ time expiring _non_ patch version with the manaul in PageStream format. We hope this satisifies 3 complaints with the betas in the past: 1, I don't like patching all the time. 2. I don't have the version installed to patch from. 3. If I start using the new version, I don't want to be left hanging with the old version when it expires. But really, when? Ok, ok. My best _guess_ is late July. We hope we make, don't be mad if we don't! Manuals will go off Monday the 21st. We should know more a couple days after that. What's in PageStream3.3 you ask? Well, I'm glad you asked :-) - Fly Out Tools Tools have now been grouped together in "popup" like icon list that let you switch between tools quickly. This gave us the "screen space" we needed to give you more tools. Also, by grouping them together it does so in a way that makes it easier to use. The new tools are: - Rotation Tool This new tool is now grouped with Object Tool, Reshape Tool, and the Crop tool. What does it do? It lets you finally set the rotation point of object(s), and if you grab and object you can rotate it right on screen! You can also slant/twist with keyboard qualifiers! - 1,2,&3 Column Tool Now you can switch between the 3 most common column counts in a text frame without changing your prefs. - Note tool Create a yellow non-printing column much like a sticky note for your notes. This will of course not print. - Scallop, Bevel, Insert Box Tool The rounded corner box and these are now grouped with the box tool. Pick a corner type from the toolbox and draw away. - Star, Wavy, Scallop, Puffy Polygon Tool Like the above two, you can quickly switch between drawing these polygon types without changing your prefs between them or drawing it as one type and changing it to another. In the future we hope to add a few more useful polygon types such as gears. - Grid Tool Yea, it was in a 3.2a beta for awhile, but there was no room for it and borders. While you could always get to it via macros or the configurable toolbar in 3.2, now its always there and "official". In the future we will group some other object types with this as a sort of Misc group. - Define Font Substitution Big time feature! Load an old document and if it uses a font you don't have it will let you know what fonts are in use that you don't have installed and give you a chance to replace those fonts with another font or just display it in another font but retain the orginal font. Loading a document from another machine or even from another platform has never been easier and more comforting. - HTML Help Now we can have the same help files between Mac and Amiga. Also, we can supply our help files with more content like we used to do, and better yet provide pictures where it helps. In the future, we hope to add interactive help and more. - Improved Adobe Illustrator Import/Export filter The current Illustrator filter leaves much to be desired. Now you can export to Illustrator and expect it to keep as much as possible when importing into another application that supports Illustrator files. - RTF Text Export Now you can exchange files with WordPerfect PC or Microsoft Word with most of the formatting intact. - 2.2 Style Place Graphics With the changes necessary for Font Subsitition, it makes it easier for us to return the old favorite 2.2 style placing of graphics. While you can configure PageStream to still place graphics automatically in the center of the screen like it works now in PageStream, if you want you can set it to allow direct placing and scaling of the graphics before it is placed on the page. For those not familiar with PageStream2, after the graphic is imported, you get a paste mouse cursor. When you click on the page it places the upper left hand corner of the graphic where you clicked. If you click and drag the mouse, you actually define the "frame" that the graphic is scaled to fit into. - Automatic Text Frame "Like" Toggle When you import text with Auto Text Frames on, any overflow text will be placed into columns created on blank pages. Before, it always created them the same as the Masterpage margins/column count & gutter specified. Now you can also choose to have the new columns created with the same coordinates, count and gutter (and even the same color!) as the last column in the article. - PostScript Style Dash Line You can still define line dash styles using the old familiar bitmap on/off mannor, but you can now also describe the individual dash lengths as you do in PostScript and applications such as Adobe Illustrator and ProDraw. - Set Type Language Submenu Installed languages are now in a submenu in the Type menu. Select one of these and you page numbers, dates, times and hyphenation will change to reflect that language if you didn't specify it in the afore mentioned attributes. Language can also be set in the Attributes dialog box, and can be defined for paragraph and character style tags. - DPI Calculator A little script for those DPI impared users! Basically, you type in the x/ydpi that you want the selected picture scaled to and it does the calculation and scales the picture for you. - Improved Color Palette - Tint Set the percentage tint for the color directly from the palette. - From/To Color Gradient to colors can now be set directly from the palette. - Swatches Small swatches in the color palette now let you identify what the color looks like. (* Note: For users with low color depth this function is pretty worthless. Unless you are in at least 32 colors, and hopefully 256 or 24bit, forget it!) - Auto Page Orientation Yea! Now you can mix landscape/portrait in a single document and print at once. Better yet, stop changing your printer prefs everytime you print a landscape document. Let PageStream do the work. - Drag Duplicate When your moving a object(s) with the Object Tool, or rotating them with the Rotate Tool, hold down the Alt (or Option) key and when you let go of the mouse button your original object will still be in the same place, but a duplicate will be placed in the new location. - Tab/Shift-Tab cycle through objects Pressing Tab/Shift-Tab cycles through the objects on the current page. - New toolbar buttons for view pictures/drawings/column outline/text framelinks/invisibles Turn pictures on and off with ease again! - Chapters can now be moved into and out of parent chapters If you change the structure of your document you don't have to start over now. Add and remove chapter levels on the go. - Pages can be moved from a document to a new chapter Create a document and decide you need chapters? No problem now. - Set screen frequency/angle/spot function for Halftone dither to non-PostScript printers Thats right, now non-PostScript users can set all this (and more). 10dpi line spot functions for those special effects, or set the freq/angle for each ink on your color printer to finally get the best color you can. ** Flash ** Now you can also set a gamma for each ink and UCR/GCR for the RGB to CYMK conversion. Set them in the XPD pref file or just "customize" it in the print setup requester. - Improved Ordered and FS dither options to provide a better range of grays to high res printers. Now the Ordered and FS dithers use a bigger cell size when you print at higher resolutions. What does this mean? Less banding on your gradients and more recognizable shades of gray/color - Mirror, Negative, Thumbnail, Crop & Reg marks, and color seps to non-PostScript I can't say that I agree with the use of several of these, but you wanted it, so you got it! At least thumbnails is _very_ nice! - Colorize B&W or Grayscale pictures. Print them on a specific spot plate. Scan a black and white logo and change it to a spot color if you want! Make it red! It will print that way, and if its a spot color it will print on that spot plate! - Load/Save printer prefs Switch between printers quickly. Just load/save miniprefs from the printer pref folder. Now you can switch between your color inkjet, black and white laser, and setup for printing to disk for an imagesetter without looking for those scraps of paper with the right settings for each. - Preview color seps on screen Just shift-select the name of the view in the hide or show submenus in the window menu and now you can not only rename the view like before, but you can also show the color plates one at a time to make sure you have right spot colors or overprint/knockout options set! - HP driver now supports user editable XPD file Add new resolutions or tweak defaults without waiting for an update from us. - External pictures FPOs are now saved with the document When you load a document you don't have to wait to display those external pictures while it rebuilds the FPO! - Easier reselection of moved external pictures If you ever reorganized your external pictures, you know what a pain it is to tell PageStream where those 50 pictures went. Now, it remembers where you helped it find each "lost" graphic and looks there for others before asking you where they went! - Unsupported accent characters get displayed as unaccented Not every font supports every accented character. Now if it can't find the accented character it will use the unaccented character. - Total object count shown in Report... Get a general idea how your document is shaping up. - Configurable Paper and DPI list in new ILBM XPD file Now you can set configure the ILBM printer driver for any DPI or paper size you want. - When defining Bullet character; and Tab fill and align on character, select from a list using a requester similar to the insert character\ requester, say goodbye to typing strange unicode characters to access characters not found in the standard system fonts but that are handled by PageStream and its font engines. This is the short list. There are of course countless bug fixes and speed enhancements, but this covers what I can remember for features that we are committed to. The details of some of these things are far more impressive in real life, but that is what the betas are all about. You get to try it "hands on" and we get some feedback. Enjoy! Deron Kazmaier SoftLogik Publishing Corp. PS- We have included the borders extension and 5 sample borders to give you an idea how it works. We hope your as taken with this extension as we are. PageStream 3.3 Feedback! ------------------------ Please post all beta feedback to the pgs33beta list. To join, send a message to listserv@softlogik.com. In the body of the message, type "subscribe pgs33list email@domain.com". The email address is optional if you wish to subscribe or unsubscribe the email address which originated the message. For now, this is done by humans so the format is not all that rigid. This mailing list is only available in message format. Directions for posting to the list will be provided in a welcome message after you join. CHANGES FROM 3.2b TO 3.3 ------------------------ TEXT: - Text marks with accented characters in their name now show in the Insert Text Mark Name and Page Number popups properly. - Internal changes for loading/saving of styletags for support on other platforms. - Improved text processing on loading/importing of text. - RTF: ANSI files now use Windows character set and not Amiga. This problem caused some characters to disappear when importing. - Numerous text attributes that only made sense with positive numbers would choke on negative numbers. In these cases negative numbers are now forced into a sensible range or ignored. - Inserted revision version number variables always showed 1.0 (ie, the first revision version number). Now shows the version number to the _last_ revision. - Fixed editing of custom color for text. + Tab Align To and Leader character, and Paragraph Bullet character have a selector like Insert Character which lets you choose the character visually from a list. New in 3.3! + Type Language- Now quickly set the language of your text used for long dates, times, page numbers. Can now be set via the Language submenu, in Attributes dialog box, and also in Paragraph and Character style tags. New in 3.3! + RTF: Now you can export your text to RTF for importing into many Windows and Macintosh applications with most formatting preserved. New in 3.3! OBJECTS: - Drawing & Picture x-box place holders are now clipped by the mask. - Picture stroke now displays properly. - Can edit zero height and/or width objects without lockup now. - Duplicated external pictures will show the proper resolution in the Information dialog box. - IFFDR2D: Fixed dash stroke style importing. - Fixed edit palette rotate button directions for multiple selected objects in object mode. It was rotating the opposite direction from the other edit palettes. - An object first moved to the pasteboard and then the move undone will no longer move to never never land but will move to the proper old location. - Objects on dissolved spreads will now be placed on the page where the center of the object lies and not the upper left hand corner as before. + B&W and Grayscale pictures can now be colored using object fill color. New in 3.3! + When dragging object(s) with the object tool, pressing and holding ALT will create a copy when releasing the mouse. The mouse form will change the a the paste icon to indicate a duplicate will be made. New in 3.3! DOCUMENTS: - Selecting and editing a page other than the current page using the page palette will now edit the proper page. + Font substitution. Documents, text, or graphics loaded which contain text which use fonts not recognized, will result in a dialog box with the list of unknown fonts and present the choice to display as a different font or replace the references. New in 3.3! + Revision Changes can now specify a version number of the revision, with defaults to bump minor (same as before), plus bump major, and custom. New in 3.3! MISC: - When first loading PageStream, if duplicate modules are found, a list will be presented with all the duplicate modules found. The user must remove any old or duplicate modules before PageStream can be loaded. Simply changing the name of a module is not suficient to disable loading. It must be moved to another directory or deleted. - Added support for defining line style using PostScript dashed style lines in addition to existing pattern. GENERAL PRINTING: + Paper orientation is automatically adjusted to best fit page orientation. New in 3.3! POSTSCRIPT PRINTING: - Driver will now attempt to print clear line styles. It will usually work, and never lock up. It kinda cheats to support this, but then again, PostScript doesn't really support it, and who would really want to do this anyway... - Gradient Sin/InvSin/Saw/InvSaw fixed for angle > 90, and the code was tightened up some and made a little faster. - Added support for dashed style lines in addition to existing pattern. - Renamed output options PostScript file to Disk file and EPS file to EPS disk file - Fixed orientation problem to imagesetters. Now if you are print a document that is 17" x 11", for custom you would choose 11"width and 17" height with landscape on, for printing to an imagesetter whose roll width is < 17". If you printing that document to an imagesetter whose roll width is >= 17" then you would choose 17" width and 11" height with no landscape. - "Fixed" problem with screwed up PPDs. Some PPDs (especially the Linotronic PPD files) specified that Symbols and Dingbats where special encoding, but had a standard characters set. They should indicate that those fonts have a special character set as well. The PostScript driver now requires that the font not be a special encoding in addition to not being a special character set. The ppds should be fixed but they are not ours to fix. This fixes the problem just fine however. - Fixed printing of stroked masked Pictures, Drawings, and EPS. NON-POSTSCRIPT PRINTING: - Page height, top & bottom margins now are calculated properly for non-square aspect ratios. + HP Printer driver now supports XPD files for simple user updates for new printers. New in 3.3! + Screen frequency/angle/ and spot function can now be set for halftone dither printing. New in 3.3! INTERFACE: - Documents listed in the recent list will be removed at initializiation time if the document no longer exists or can not be found. - Masterpages can now be moved between chapters after being created. The interface tried to let you do it, but it didn't work. - Text frame routing displays better now on rotated text frames. + In plate control, clicking on the icons in the list will now toggle that option as if you had clicked on the popup or check box. New in 3.3! + Added toolbar buttons for View-> Show Pictures, Drawings, Column Outline, Text Frame Links, and Invisibles. New in 3.3! + Chapters can now be moved into and out of parent chapters using the document palette. New in 3.3! + When creating a new chapter, holding down SHIFT key when choosing OK will move pages from the document into the new chapter. New in 3.3! + Flyout tools to reduce toolbox size and increase number of available tools. New in 3.3! + New drawing tools: One/Two/Three count columns, Scallop/Inset/Bevel boxes, Pie ellipse, Star/Scallop/Puffy/Wavy polygons. New in 3.3! + New editing tool: Rotation tool. Free rotate selected objects by grabing their size handles or any portion of the object and rotating them. Also, the rotation point can now be selected and moved with the rotation tool. When rotating a object(s), holding down the ALT key will create a duplicate object rotated to the new orientation. Pressing Shift or Control while rotating will slant or twist. New in 3.3! + Magnify Tool can now drag zoom from center or from corner. Definable in prefs, and shift key will live toggle when drag zooming. New in 3.3! + Added "Select Text on Paste" toggle to File Preferences. Now text can be selected or not after inserting/pasting. New in 3.3! + Added "Place Graphic in Center" toggle to File Preferences. When checked graphics will be automatically placed/pasted in center of view. When _not_ checked user will need to place the graphic with the mouse. Drag out to define region to fit graphic to. Only the toggle has been added. No code behind it yet! New in 3.3! + Added Like Masterpage/Previous toggle to Automatic Text Frames. When set to Like Masterpage, the automatic text frame will be positioned to mimic the Masterpage using its margins and column count/gutter. When set to Like Previous, the automatic text frame will be positioned to match the last previously created text frame in the article. New in 3.3! + Added support for dashed style lines in addition to existing pattern in line/fill for objects and text. New in 3.3! + New drawing tool: Note tool. Located with column tools. Creates a yellow non-printing column for entering in notes much like a sticky note. New in 3.3! + Improved color palette. Now set the secondary to color for gradients, apply tints, and preview the color with the provided color swatches. New in 3.3! SCRIPTING: - Internal changes for loading/saving of scripts for support on other platforms. - GETTOOLMODE now returns the proper tool mode name. - Changed DUPLICATE and TRANSFORM command. Added [IDLIST &idlist/.COUNT.0.1...], and they now return count of objects created. + New macro: MERGESUBPATHS. Turns all but the initial movetos in a selected path to linetos. New in 3.3! + Changed MOVECHAPTER go move chapters to the end of the chapters, and also to move chapters into and out of other chapters. New in 3.3! + Added "FROMDOCUMENT" parameter to NEWCHAPTER command. This parameter will cause the pages & chapters of the document to be moved into the new chapter. New in 3.3! + Added [DRAGZOOM ] to SETMAGNIFYINCREMENTS command. New in 3.3! + Added [LIKE ] to SETAUTOCOLUMNS command. New in 3.3! + Added [BITMAPSIZE stem/.W.H.XDPI.YDPI] to GETPICTURE command. New in 3.3! + Added new arexx script, PictureCalculator.rexx. The user enters the dpi to scale the picture too, and it does the rest. New in 3.3! + Changed ADDREVISION BUMPREV to BUMPMAJOR and added BUMPMINOR (the default) New in 3.3! + Added [NOTE] parameter to DRAWCOLUMN. Will override the column default fill and stroke with a sold yellow fill and a dashed black stroke. Will force the column to non-printing. New in 3.3! BME: - Fixed paintbrush leaving garabage behind when clearing a region. - Updated address and phone numbers. - Internal changes for loading/saving of scripts for support on other platforms. - Fixed a problem in the display which caused crashed at various times. - Crop no longer erase old selection since it was redrawn afterwards anyway. MAC: - Scratch path is now used. VM files are written to the path assigned as the scratch path and no longer are written to the hidden directory on the startup volume. - Printer setup values from the standard print dialogs no longer get reset to the defaults. NOTES ----- - SoftLogik recommends CanonStudio or Studio II for printing on Canon printers. Some Canon models are supported in Epson emulation mode by PageStream's custom Epson driver. PAGESTREAM 3 EXTRAS ------------------- Borders1 Library ($40): Basic Borders. Contains 60 borders, including coupon, map and symbol designs. Borders2 Library ($40): Geo Borders. Contains 60 decorative borders in a variety of designs including nature, classic, and music. Borders1&2 ($60): Purchase both borders libraries and save $20! TextFX 2 Extension ($50): Warp text in shapes, bend text on curves, and convert text to graphics! TrueType Font Engine ($25): Use TrueType fonts with PageStream 3. Wordworth Document Filter ($20): Open entire Wordworth documents in PageStream 3, retaining pictures, text, endnotes, headers, footers, objects, etc. Gary's Effects ($25): Twelve new cool effects for PageStream 3's BME, including Convolve, Blur, Histogram, Gamma, Average, Threshold and more! Direct Templates ($30): 488 templates for PaperDirect(R)'s North American papers. If you use PaperDirect papers, you need Direct Templates. Home & Office Forms ($20): 50 templates for the home, school and office. North American paper sizes. HOW TO CONTACT SOFTLOGIK ------------------------ SoftLogik Publishing 1732A Westpark Center Drive Fenton, MO 63026 SALES 1-800-829-8608 (314-305-7878) sales@softlogik.com FAX 314-305-7874 DIGEST listhelp@softlogik.com EMAIL support@softlogik.com WEB http://www.softlogik.com THIS ARCHIVE CAN BE DISTRIBUTED AS LONG AS IT IS LEFT INTACT WITHOUT ANY CHANGES! NO CHARGE ASIDE FROM A REASONABLE COPYING AND DISK FEE CAN BE CHARGED FOR IT. Copyright 1997 SoftLogik Publishing Corporation SPatch Copyright 1992 SAS Institute LHex Copyright 1994 Commodore