This is the second release version; there are probably still some bugs. Use with caution. Let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions.
Don Cox
5 Cornfield Rd
Middlesbrough
Cleveland
TS5 5QJ
England
A shareware fee of $15 or equivalent (cash is easiest) will bring you a copy of the latest update. I hope to add some more genies to the collection, including some for Pro Draw.
This document is designed to be printed out through ProPage or Transwrite. Each paragraph is a single line. Do not feed it through Ed or you will lose the ends of some paragraphs.
MAKE BAR GRAPHS
These are debugged versions of the ones supplied by Gold Disk, with the added feature of allowing you to select any font.
Future development - bar charts made of little pictures, as in Adobe Illustrator.
STEP AND REPEAT DELUXE
This starts with a single box, which could contain text or an image, and generates a wide variety of patterns. The default spacing is the size of the box, so if you just set the number of rows and columns you will get a simple tiling arrangement. The boxes in the resulting pattern are grouped so you can move them together (hold down shift).
If you set the X and/or Y scales, the boxes will change size across and/or down the page. Setting the X offset gives a brick wall effect.
The offset angle is meant for patterns such as 60 degree triangular repeats. Only the X spacing is used in this case.
If you set a rotation angle each unit is set to a greater angle than the last. Try this on a straight grid. If the X and Y settings for the centre of rotation are the centre of the original box, each box rotates around its own centre, so you get a straight grid containing boxes at various angles; if not, all the boxes rotate around the same centre, and you get a warped grid. Note that if you pick the "Same Again" option, you will get the same rotation centre as before, which may not be the centre of a new original box - i.e. "Same Again" may give you a warped grid.
Setting both X and Y spacing to zero, with a suitable centre of rotation and rotation angle, will give a circle of units. If you also set either a spiral scale (make this number very nearly 1) or a spiral increment (this might be about the same as the height of the box), you get a spiral. Both these would normally use a single column with lots of rows - but of course you can have sets of circles with X spacing between them.
Spiral scale gives a logarithmic spiral; spiral increment gives an equidistant spiral. Set a negative number for increment to spiral inward. If you get too ambitious you will run out of memory, especially if the units are bitmaps. Things that work immediately after booting the Amiga may not work later.
To get concentric circles, first make a vertical single column at 12 o'clock and then generate a circle from each unit in turn. Use "Same settings" on entry.
All kinds of combination settings will give various unexpected results.
BORDERS FRAMES
This puts frames around boxes and at the same time sets a margin all round the box, so that bitmaps do not cover up the frame.
MARGINS ALL ROUND
To save you having to type the same number in four times when setting a uniform margin.
BORDERS REPEATS
This is for putting decorative borders around boxes. The borders are made from design units (boxes containing clips or bitmaps), which must be visible on the screen so that they can be clicked on.
There is a selection of PDraw clips of fleurons provided for experimentation, and a few bitmaps. You can use up to five different units to make up a repeat pattern; the pattern is specified by typing in letters. The pattern length is limited only by the space available. For instance "abcba" would use the three fleurons selected in the order they were clicked on, followed by the first two in reverse order. Then (provided there is room along the side of the box) the pattern starts over again. If uppercase letters are typed, units will be flipped left-to-right: "abBA". To be able to set "aA" you must click on a single box twice. Flipping only works for structured drawings - PPage will not flip bitmaps or text.
The program will not flip units top-to-bottom. If you want this, clone the box containing the original fleuron and set the Y scale to a negative number; this will invert the image.
It is best to set up your set of boxes containing the original units either in the bottom margin or off the page. You can have corner units only or side units without corners. The original corner unit, unlike the side units, can be rotated to suit if it is facing the wrong way.
BORDERS SIMPLE SHAPES
These draw various borders around boxes, using data built into the genie. Unlike Borders Repeats, you do not have to provide any boxes, except the one that needs a border. Several simple geometrical patterns are provided. The resulting border is in a single box which lies in front of the box you clicked on.
The patterns use the current line and fill colours. You can get some nice effects by superimposing a coloured border on a box with a thick coloured frame, or two different borders over each other. Note that the current line and fill colours can only be changed when you are in Null Pointer mode. If you are in box drawing mode, for instance, they may appear to change but nothing happens.
Try asking for very thick borders - up to almost half the box width.
If the box is at an angle, PPage sometimes has difficulty drawing it on the screen (it may fill in solid), but the printout may be OK. Sometimes the screen is OK and the printout is solid.
Pro Page 4.0A does not show these borders correctly on the screen in 256 colour mode. Later versions may be OK.
MAKE PIE CHART
This generates a plain 2D pie chart from a set of percentages and labels which you enter.
BOOKLET
If you wish to lay out an A5 booklet consisting of a number of sheets of A4 paper stapled in the middle, this genie will arrange the pages for you. You design the work on a series of landscape format A4 pages, each showing a pair of facing pages for the final booklet.
The first A4 page will be the outer cover, i.e. the first and last pages.
When the design work is complete, run this genie. It will save your design and then cut each page in half and rearrange the halves correctly for printing. Of the resulting pages, the first half are for printing on one side of the paper; you then turn the paper over and print the rest of the pages on the other side.
The genie uses .eps files to split the pages, so they will appear as blank grey rectangles, and will only print on a Postscript printer. However, you can save a Postscript file to disk and then print it out on any printer using the P.D. program "Post", if you have the necessary Postscript fonts in the directory CGFonts:ps. A genie is provided to automate this procedure. Remember that the printer page size in "Post" is in dots: multiply your printer's dots-per-inch by the page size to get the right numbers. There is a bug in "Post" which stops it from printing colour bitmaps under WB 2.04; black-and-white bitmaps are OK and so is WB 1.3.
The genie will handle any size, not just A4. For an A4 booklet, you would design on A3 pages (landscape format).
LANDSCAPE PAGE
This converts an existing page from portrait to landscape format or vice versa. It sets the Postscript output parameters accordingly. Useful for working on double-page spreads.
COPY BOX TO PAGES LINKED
STEP AND REPEAT LINKED
These are both just the same as the standard ones but the resulting boxes are in a linked text chain.
REPLACE BOXES ON PAGES
This is useful if you have done "Copy Box to Pages" and then you want to make a change throughout. For instance, you have put a neat little box at the top of every page giving the date of a magazine, and then you realize you have the wrong month. Or you want to change the type size.
The boxes must have their top left corners in exactly the same place on each page.
IMPORT BITMAP 1 to 1
Most useful for owners of PAL Amigas, which have square pixels. If you own ADPro, you can set the exact size of an image by using the "Define Pixel Aspect Ratio" command. PPage will pick up this info on loading. Otherwise, it normally scales the image to fit the box, and assumes it is NTSC, which is not always what you want.
STYLE TAGS AUTOCREATE
This goes right through a document and creates a style tag for each different text style it finds. Existing styles are not changed, but slight variants such as the use of italics will be given a new name (a requester allows you to ignore these small changes). The names are a simplified description of the type and can of course be altered to suit yourself later.
The genie will also label all matching text as having the same tag, so you can define a tag from one bit of text in a long document and after running this genie alter all similar text, even when you forgot to use tags to start with.
A list of styles is saved as a text file in Ram:, for checking. Remember that you can save and load a list of styles as a text file from the menu.
Known problem: Under Pro Page 4.0, it is making too many different tags.
STYLE TAGS CREATE SINGLE
Much the same but does only one and gives you the chance to set the name at the time. It just saves your having to type in all the specs by hand in the usual requester.
FIT TEXT TO BOXES
This will adjust the size of the text in an article until it is the largest size that will fit into the available box or chain of boxes. On a long article, there may be a few blank lines at the end: you will find that increasing the size by 1/8 point causes an overflow. Probably if ProPage could adjust sizes in smaller steps we could get a closer fit.
When fitting headlines into boxes remember that it is the bounding box of the type that is fitted: letters are often quite a bit deeper than you expect. Make sure your box is deep enough or the size will be limited by height, not width.
TEXT TO GRID
Fits the bounding boxes of the text (not the baselines) to the current grid. If the grid is much larger than the text you may get two or more lines of text in each grid space. This genie is useful for lining up text in adjacent columns. Line spacings are changed from relative to fixed. It is best to specify the grid in picas (remember 1.2 picas means 1 pica 2 points, not 1 2/10 picas).
BOXES TO GRID
GRID FROM BOX
Obvious, really.
BOXES NAME ALL
This invents a not very imaginative name for every box in the document (except those already named).
BOXES FRONT TO BACK
This genie has a rather messy interface, but it works. It gives you a list of the boxes on the page, and you click on the names in the order you want them, starting at the front. You don't have to click all of them. Useful when you have a jumble of overlapping boxes.
ASCII FILE PROCESSOR
This is a pre-processor which deals with the usual problems caused by ASCII files such as doc files if you just load them in. Long rows of pluses etc are broken up, multiple spaces replaced by tabs, inchmarks replaced by left and right double quotes (NB these characters are missing from CG Times) ...
Would normally be followed by Auto Import. The processed file has "proc" on the end of its name.
BOXES CENTRE ON PAGE
Why doesn't Quark XPress do this?
BOXES WOB
The commonest colour change is to white text in a black box. This genie also asks for a margin size. Pity Pro Page doesn't have vertical centring.
GRID ISOMETRIC
These two grids (30 and 60 degrees) are useful for using the Polygon drawing tool for simple diagrams.
GRID SETTINGS FROM BOXES
These to some extent replace the moveable guidelines found in other programs.
ILBMs USING POST
PRINT USING POST
To use these, you must have "Post" set up correctly, including the post.library in your libs: directory. "Post" is available on Fish disks.
ILBMs are intended for generating video titles or presentation slides using scaleable fonts and structured drawings in Pro Page. You have to set up a page whose size corresponds to the ILBMs you want: for instance, a page size of 6.4 by 5.12 inches will generate 640x512 ILBMs. Multiple pages can be produced.
Post only gives primary colours: you can get more, if you have lots of memory (e.g. 9 Megs), by making your pictures double size (12.8 by 10.24 page) and then halving them in ADPro.
Printing via Post gives better type than printing directly from Pro Page where the original typeface is a Type 1 Postscript face and the printer is non-Postscript. Typefaces lose quality when converted from Type 1 to Compugraphic. You have to have the relevant .psfont files in CGFonts:ps. Otherwise you just get blobs.
Expect a pause of a couple of minutes before printing starts.
JUMPY TEXT
COLOUR TEXT
Try it. They do cancel each other out - if you have multicoloured text and make it jumpy it will lose its colours. Obviously I have to write a combined one.
IMPORT FRAMES
If you split an anim file up into its individual frames (using DPaint or ADPro for instance), you can print them out nicely with this genie. It is useful if you need to show what is in your animation but don't have it on tape.
Some Latin and some English body copy. The Latin is real Latin not fake (like Lorem ipsum): it is from Vitruvius and is all about seige engines and battering rams. Note the use of S (semi) for 1/2 as in XXIV S. You will need hyphenation on as there are lots of long words.
The English is a complete chapter from Joshua Slocum's "Sailing Alone Round the World", which is one of the best books ever written. It fills about six pages.
There are also a few poems for you to practice your drop capitals on. They will appeal more to science fiction lovers and fractal freaks than to those who like Shelley.
DIC palette
This palette contains a selection of 61 colours from the DIC Color Guide published by Dainippon Ink and Chemicals, as used in the book "Color Harmony" by Hideaki Chijiiwa (ISBN 0-935603-06-9).
Although no book can tell you which colours to use in a design, this handy and attractive little book offers some very good pointers. It includes many pages showing two, three or four of the 61 colours used together in various combinations, from which those who are not too sure of their judgement when using colours may be able to pick a suitable set for a DTP job. Reasonably priced and recommended.
