Pictures pasted into Word are paragraphs. To avoid confusion, use a return before and after the picture to isolate it. Otherwise, words do crazy things by trying to remain in the picture paragraph.
If the 4k SCSI Probe is in your System Folder, you may be able to mount a damaged floppy with its help. (Thanks, E-Systems Gazette.)
Here’s a use for Alias in System 7.0 and perhaps with the shareware Alias program. Make an alias of your hard disk. Put the Alias on a floppy disk (it’s only 1k). Now slip the floppy into any other Mac on the same network and have complete access to your hard drive. Whoa! Powerful, eh wot?
How long will a 3.5 inch floppy last.
Depends.
• Mechanical components made of plastic and metal, 20+ years.
• Magnetic sheets, 10+ years.
• Operational durability, 18+ years under normal usage (an hour a day with that disk).
• Malfunctioning drives shorten disk life.
• Back up anyway. (Thanks, LAMUG & Carol Stieglitz.)
Why buy a hardware RAM Cache board? The RAM cache on your Control Panel “remembers” stuff otherwise available only from your floppy or hard disk. A hardware RAM cache “remembers” stuff otherwise available from RAM and executes it faster than RAM chips can. Class dismissed.
Piggy back a custom bookmark or other small job in the corners of larger jobs. I hate to waste the space (and the paper stock), so I often make small mini-signs in the space left around other jobs which don’t take up the entire sheet.
Not only does matte fixative blacken up muddy laser printer output. It also protects the toner from cracking and flaking.
Brown manila wrapping paper can be cut into 8 -1/2 x 11 sheets and run through a LaserWriter. Does that give you any ideas? (From Aldus magazine, $18 a year and worth it!)
How do you get the Apple printer driver in PageMaker 4.0? Hold down Option while selecting Print.
For three practically free Laser fonts, send $15 to Font Bank, 2620 Central St., Evanston, IL 60201, or call 1-708-328-7378 and charge it on your MC or VISA. The three fonts look pretty good.
Help! Can anyone steer me to a good set of eps borders? They should be both vertical and horizontal for full 8 1/2 x 11 sheets. Or they should be proportional to those uses, so they can be stretched successfully to full-page size.
Short of that, anyone know how to get the nice borders OUT OF Laser Award application and into eps format? No one I know has found a way.
Another way to open a template in Word without running it is to click the template once and duplicate it with a Command/D. Your template is safe. (Thanks, CMUG member Felix Marti.)
To retrieve a Glossary item fast in Word, do this: First, have a letterhead, for instance. Give it a shorthand name, like LH1 for a certain letterhead. Insert it into your Glossary under the Edit menu. To enter this or other Glossary items rapidly, select the insertion point where you want this letterhead. Type Command/Delete. In the bottom left corner of the screen, type LH1. Hit Return. A Glossary item which has been correctly formatted for this use and this insertion point will come in just right. (Thanks again, Felix.)
Ever print out a five page document and get ten sheets out of the printer, with every other one blank?
Check and see if you don’t have a few empty returns hanging over onto page 2. You do? That’s what I thought!
Installing Apple’s Desktop Manager in your System Folder speeds up the Finder. This item comes with Apple Share, but we are told that if you take a blank disks to your dealer, they will put it on there for you. Try it and find out. (Thanks Fred Showker, one of the best Maccers out there, from Shenandoah MUG in Virginia.)
Word Master only works in WriteNow, so why not install it inside of WriteNow and save a DA space? Also, Stepping Out stops WriteNow from printing, but a fix is to select the page numbers rather than print all. WriteNow is supposed to have a more permanent fix. Send your original disk to get it, but ask first, OK?
In Design Studio, Save before rotating. That’s because you might well get a bomb when rotating. Rotating around an object’s center seems to be safe, but why chance it?
Two MUG newsletters recently told how to make resizable letters in PageMaker. Both required the commercial SmartScrap. You can do it with the plain old Scrapbook, folks. Type the letter (or letters). Select with the pointer tool. Copy. Open Scrapbook, Paste. Close Scrapbook. Place Scrapbook. Click once. Unload the Place tool in the Toolbox with a click. Your letter(s) can now be dragged horizontally, vertically, or whatever.
Stuffit Deluxe is out the door. It has several special new compression modes for sound and color graphics. It has virus protection and on-the-fly compression and decompression. $99.95 retail (Say, that’s a hundred bucks isn’t it? who we kidding with that 99.95 stuff?) Upgrades for registered Stuffit shareware owners is $40.
Disinfectant 2.0 is out. It includes an INIT for virus protection and a built in manual which you can call up or print as desired. The price is still great: FREE. Thank you, John Norstad and fellow programmers at Northwestern U.
New Plusses are going for $879 retail, with school prices as low as $637 for high volume purchases. One possibility is that Apple is cleaning out the warehouse, so don’t wait too long at these prices.
And if you are selling a Plus, don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t go for $900. Know what I mean? Consider a gift to a non-profit, but talk to your tax preparer first.
There is a new RAM disk out there. It is NANO-disk (by Robin Williams??) by Technology Works. It lets you use from 1 to 28 megs as RAM disk, $89.
Do you alternately work with picas and inches in the same document? Try Pica Calculator DA, $10 shareware. It should show up on bulletin boards soon.
If you have a Mac friend overseas in the military, you can lend them a hand. Most software outlets use UPS or FedEx. Neither will ship to APO addresses. So offer to trans-ship software to them. All it costs you is the postage. (Thanks, Washington Apple Pi newsletter.)
HyperCard 2.0 will need System 6.05 or better to run.
If you have LaserWriter driver 6.0 installed, your LaserWriter will print gray tones for colors of text selected in, say, MS Word.
Does this give you some ideas? Think about large font sizes and picture fonts, for example.
Colors are displayed as black on a B&W monitor, but print out in “appropriate” shades of gray. Blue produces the darkest, followed down the scale by Red, Magenta, Green and Cyan, with Yellow as the lightest gray. The seventh shade, of course, is black. There ain’t no white unless you reverse something on a darker background. I haven’t tried that.
If you need UPS software (which looks up zones, calculates fees and prints labels, watch out! There is a UPS 4 Mac product by SD&C out there for $400. You shouldn’t pay that! ProVUE has a Panorama template that does everything the SD& C one does except manifests, and it costs a whole $20. That is 20 times less expensive! Ask for UPS Shipper.
As an added bonus, the template was written by a former CMUG member, Paul Chance.
If you need it to do manifests, it is easy enough for the user to add it to the Panorama template. How’s that for saving you big bucks?
Here’s a business card idea from Aldus magazine. Do your cards 12 up horizontal on 8 1/2 x 11 paper, with a 1/4" margin all around. Print backward (mirror under Change in Print dialog) on transparency material. Peel the backing from a sheet of sticky-back label stock (Avery or other). Adhere the toner side of the transparency to the sticky side. Press in place carefully. Trim the margins and cut the cards apart. Use a quality paper cutter for nice clean cuts.
Make a kiddie coloring book. Use large, open line clip art. Aldus magazine suggests Wide format with two pieces of art, top and bottom, at the right side of each page. Print out, cut horizontally and fold vertically. Use two staples in the gutter. (You do have a long-reach stapler, don’t you? Sigh.
Wanna scan stuff? 75-year-old books are fair game. They are free of copyright. Now you know why you see all that old-fashioned clip art out there.
Sorry Chuck! Yes, I have become enamored of another PageMaker third party book. It’s Real World PageMaker 4 by Olav Kvern and Steven Roth. Boy, do these guys know that they are talking about! I thought I knew a lot of PageMaker hints. In fact, I wrote a PageMaker hint book. But this sucker has two times as many hints as my book. It is GO-O-O-O-O-O-D! It’s $24.95 from Bantam Books of those nice ITC people. Go get it.
Meanwhile Using PageMaker by Chuck Weigand is no slouch either. But I have found a new love—Real World PageMaker 4.
Flipping the pages in your favorite Mac magazine is conducive to good pocketbook health. For instance, I found the Z88 portable for $499 on page 93 of the 10 July MacWeek, and flipped a page to find it for $599. Caveat emptor.
You can position text along a curved line in Works 2.0, but each letter remains upright. Sort of an ugly way to go.
Couple of PageMaker quickies.
• Hold down the Shift key as you drag the left indent marker and it will move independently of the left margin marker.
• Shift/Revert reverts only to the last mini-save, not to the last full-blown Save.
• When Placing, if you double click on the name of another PageMaker document in the dialog box, you can import stories from it. You get shown the first 20 characters of each story to help you pick the right one.
• You can add a font using Suitcase without quitting PageMaker 4.0. Just close the current document. Reopen after adding the font(s). (Thanks Real World PageMaker 4.)
To give PageMaker a longer time-out period, open the .apd file for your printer. Find this line
Enter this line as one line, Change the 240 to suit yourself. This is the number of seconds.
Select Proof print in PageMaker's dialog box to get a fast proof without TIFF and eps. graphics.
If a hard disk won’t boot, no harm in trying SCSI Probe in the Control Panel from a floppy disk in which you have installed that cdev.
An imported IBM graphic which shows up as text on a Mac may become usable by changing its type from TEXT to TIFF. Use Disktop, ResEdit, Info… DA, or whatever to do this. Info… DA is $1.00 shareware. Can’t beat that.
Amazing Paint by CE Software is being touted as “in the spirit of MacPaint 1.0.” That sure says a lot for it.
Have you heard about the new utility software called Dictionary Manager? What does it do? It looks at each of your half dozen different dictionaries and spits out a single dictionary document which each and every program requiring a dictionary can access.
You can now throw away all those other dictionaries and save a megabyte or more on your hard drive.
Interested?
Tough!
I lied. No programmer has graced us with Dictionary Manager yet. But wow, are we ready for it. Hint, hint, hint!
Does your Mac holler for a disk long since removed? Is your desktop cluttered with grayed-out icons of disks you have already ejected? Try this: get into an SF dialog box. Hold down the Option key and eject the unwanted disk. Hold the Option key down a few extra seconds.
This didn’t work? Rebuild the desktop.
You have an eps graphic in PageMaker. The original eps document is long gone somewhere, and now you want to change the graphic.
Are you screwed? Nope. Copy and Paste the graphic into its own PageMaker document. “Print” it as a Postscript file (select the eps option, too). This file can be opened in Illustrator. If there are fonts in the file which you do not own, be sure you left the Download Postscript Fonts option checked. (Thanks, MacWorld.)
If you buy 500 at a whack, bubble packs to fit a 3.5" disk are less than 12¢ each, including shipping from Quill office supplies. You can’t use 500? Line up 3-4 buddies and split an order.
To convert MacDraw II files to eps, ungroup everything. Open the file in Canvas 2.1 or later. Use Canvas Separator 1.01’s Convert menu item to make it an Illustrator 1.1 compatible file. Open a blank doc in Illustrator and open the converted file. Select all, ungroup the elements which the conversion grouped.
For Freehand use, run the file through Illustrator first and save with a Macintosh screen representation. (Thanks, Virginia Pilot vis FatBits from Ventura/Conejo CA MUG.)
Disk Doubler is getting raves as a Stuffit replacement. It replaces files it stuffs (not duplicates as a stuffed item), but it does so safely, it is claimed. But Stuffit Deluxe deserves a good look first, if for no other reason than its long, excellent history as shareware.
You will be surprised how much of a PageMaker document survives a crash. Even if you haven’t done a “real” Save recently. Here are some of the actions which make PageMaker do a mini-save:
• move to another page
• change anything in Page Setup
• click Ok in Define Styles dialog
• Save or Save As…
• click on the current page item
However, on a couple of recent crashes, I got back a PageMaker document complete to the last comma, even though I had done NONE of the above recently. Whew!
Of course you can also get a corrupted document during a crash, so everything is not rosy.
The DeskWrite module in DeskWorks is coming in for praise. It is “Word-like” without all the Word departures from the Mac interface. It is easy to learn if you know Word. It has some nice added features, too.
Check it out!
Macintosh Construction Forum has a directory of builders’ software. It comes with a subscription to MCF Monthly (10 issues a year) for $69. P.O. Box 1272, Sandpoint, ID 83864.
Many power user authors still talk about opening and closing the Scrapbook to copy its contents to a document.
Not necessary. Open it ONCE. Drag it to the lover right of the screen. Copy the first item, click on the document you are working on. Resize its window up a sliver from the bottom, allowing the Scrapbook to show. Now you can Paste. Click on the Scrapbook, find the graphic or text, Copy, click on the document, Paste, and so forth.
Wasn’t that easy? A giant time saver.
I haven’t tried this yet, but it is too hot to wait: eps images which take a lot of time to redraw in desktop publishing programs can be sped up. Open them in SmartArt, reimage (you don’t have to change it to reimage it), and use the reimaged graphic. This little move cuts down 10 to 20 second screen redraws to about 0 seconds.
For an easy dropcap in PageMaker, try this:
• highlight the letter
• go to Type Specs
• select a size (36 to 38 point for 12 point text?)
• in the Position popup, select subscript
• click Options…
• change superscript size to 100%
• change subscript position to 50%
• click OK
• highlight entire paragraph
• set leading to about 120% of text size (try to match the automatic leading, but do not use automatic) Do not include the drop cap in the selected text
• tab in lines of text which overlap the dropcap
• adjust tab for appropriate spacing
That’s all folks. Easy. (Idea from MacChicago, enhanced by Phil Russell.
