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2007-12-01
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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