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1989-04-05
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8KB
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143 lines
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ EASY TEXT PROFESSIONAL ~
~ ~
~ a review by Richard McGee ~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now that the long awaited EZ-TEXT PROFESSIONAL has been
released, I obtained a copy of V1.0 of the program and thought I would
offer STEN readers a review of its potential. You can then make an
informed decision of whether or not to buy it for yourself.
Remember, you saw it here first!
The program arrives on three discs with an A5 ring binder
containing full documentation.The discs are not copy protected in any
way, and Roger Pearson (the co-author with Sean Hodgson) advises an
immediate backup and to store the originals in a safe place.
The program cannot be run from the original discs, it must first be
installed, and this can be either on to floppies (you will need four
formatted blank discs) or onto a hard disc (any partition with at least
1.5 megs free). The program itself needs 1 Meg of RAM and a double
sided disc drive, so if your set up is less than this then read no
further and go back to STEN! It will run on a colour monitor or TV in
medium resolution, but obviously it will look a lot better on a
monochrome monitor.
Installation of the software is quite straightforward and takes
approximately 10 minutes.You need to first define some parameters-
whether floppy or hard disc installation, if hard disc your boot
partition (usually C:) and the partition that it is to be installed
to.The printer and monitor type will also be requested (once
installed for medium resolution it cannot be altered for high-res
use without re-running the installation program again). All disc swaps
are requested.
In use the program utilises the dreaded GDOS, but the manual is
very good and explains what GDOS is all about as far as this program is
concerned, and makes it understandable. Suitable fonts for either
medium or high resolution are supplied, as are matching printer
fonts. While these are not mind blowing they are adequate and allow you
to get used to the program. Other fonts are freely available in the
Public Domain or from ZZ Soft at an extra charge. The number of fonts
that can actually be loaded into the program is 10 but you can have
each face in a variety of point sizes depending on memory. This should
prove quite adequate for most needs.
An Assign.sys file is obviously needed, but this is set up as part
of the installation procedure, and any fonts you subsequently
purchase from ZZ Soft will have a suitable assign.sys included on
the disc, so really you can forget about the intricacies of GDOS and
get on with your publishing.
EZ Text Pro makes full use of GEM with pull down menus and a
scrollable window. In medium resolution only a part of the actual page
is visible on screen, but you can scroll the page in all four
directions and a full page preview is available. The full page
preview does not allow the magnification of the page (as in
Timeworks) so any type in a small point size cannot be examined, it
simply shows up as grey bars-in fact all text shows as grey bars, only
the graphics are visible. Roger Pearson says this is for speed but
I feel that allowing the page to be magnified would have improved the
program.
All information is entered onto the page into a suitable frame
whether for text or graphics. The frames are defined at the outset and
once defined there type cannot be altered i.e. text frames can never
contain graphics. These frames can be easily resized using handles
for height and width, and they can be "grouped" to allow manipulation
of a set of frames at once. They can be hidden behind each other or
certain frames brought to the front. A natural hierarchy is
maintained, whereby the most recently created frame is on the top but
they can be re-ordered using "bring to front" or "send to back". The
frame can be defined either with the mouse or by absolute co-ordinates
for more exact placement. The page rulers can be in inches or
centimetres, whichever you prefer to work in.
Text can be imported in a variety of formats or it can be
directly typed into a frame, but this is only really suitable for
headlines, as a font in a small type size is unreadable on the screen
in medium resolution so editing is extremely difficult if not well
nigh impossible. (This is where a page magnification feature would
have been useful). Text can be linked from one frame to another so that
creating multi-column text is easy. You can have up to 9 columns which
I feel is more than adequate.
The document can also be created in a variety of sizes
including a custom option of up to 35x35 inches if your printer can
cope. Single or double sided documents can also be set.
Headers and footers are easily definable for position on the page and
font.
Clip art can be imported in monochrome format and a further program
is available that will automatically dither a colour picture for you
to include in your documents, so most formats can be handled. You can
crop, resize and optimise the picture for printer, screen and
aspect ratio. On the graphics front the program allows 28 standard
fill patterns with one user definable fill allowed per document, with
greyscales from 0 - 100%
Vector objects are included which can be resized without
distortion or loss of clarity. These come as triangles, stars,
squares etc.,and can be outlined, filled or transparent or a mixture
of these.
I have used the program for a few weeks now and have not come
across any bugs or had any problems. It is easy to use and I feel ideal
for a beginner or anyone whose DTP needs are quite simple. I have found
it useful for printing out README files and making them easier to
follow, although this does involve some alteration to the structure
of the text document to make multi-column layout more suitable. One
problem I must admit to noticing though is that I cannot seem to
have any accessories loaded at the same time as the program (I have a
1 Meg STe). I would have liked to have had a text processor
available as an accessory but Roger Pearson has said that they are
working on a module to allow a full screen fully integrated text
editor and this will be available soon.
Text wrap around graphics is not possible with this version but,
again this has been thought about and hopefully will be available in
Version II.All in all I can thoroughly recommend EZ TEXT PRO if your
DTP needs are not too complex. At 39.95 with full documentation it is
extremely good value for money, and a demo version is available for
£5.00 to "try before you buy".
Ez-Text Pro is available from :
ZZ SOFT
25 HONEYHOLE
BLACKBURN
LANCASHIRE
BB2 3BQ
Phone 0254 672965
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