¢DTP ATARI8¢¢by Eric Bemrose¢¢¢PAGE EDITOR V3.3¢¢ Created by Alan Kirk in 1992, this is another good page layout program. Designed to run in Atari BASIC on a 48k machine, it will also run under Turbo Basic with MyDOS and supports the Ramdisk on machines with a larger memory. It comes on a double sided single density disk, complete with Turbo BASIC and MyDOS 4.5. A comprehensive 18 page manual and ready to print sample page layout is also included.¢¢ After boot-up the main menu offers the following options. Text/Graphics Editor. Printer. ASCII Text File Converter. Print Shop art Converter. Typeface Maker. Quit (to DOS).¢¢ The printed page is made up from panels created by the Text/Graphics Editor. This is preceded by a help screen listing the commands available, it can be recalled at any time if needed.¢¢ The usual 80 column work screen (with a prominent cursor, unlike Digital Editor) is used for the creation of text and the placing of graphics. The screen has a work area of 20 lines of 80 columns with a prompt/command line at the bottom. A complete page is therefore composed of four full width (banner) slices. However you can print just one, two, or three panels if that is all you need.¢¢ For headings and the like a larger text is available, in eight heights and three widths. Any standard font can be loaded for this purpose, and a small selection is provided. Sanserif is automatically loaded on boot-up, but the standard Atari font is always available for use whatever has been loaded.¢¢ Margins can be adjusted to create seperate columns of text as required. Blocks of text can be moved or copied as you like, within or between panels. Justification to the right margin is also an option.¢¢ Text can also be imported from a word processor file using the convertor module. This converts directly into panels with up to three columns of text with various options regarding margins and positioning. Existing panels can be used or new ones created. The converter can handle up to three pages of text at a time, 14400 characters maximum.¢¢ In the graphics mode a blinking cursor appears, controlled by the joystick or arrow keys. Solid and broken lines, circles and ellipses can be drawn, or an area of screen can be filled with one of six pre-set patterns. The clip art function allows a selected area of the screen to be saved as an .ART file, or more usually to place pre-drawn icons anywhere on the screen, many of which have been included for your convenience.¢¢ These icons can be reversed, inverted, and doubled in size, up to a maximum of half the panel. Print Shop icons can be used after conversion into .ART files, these can be edited before conversion. Standard 62 sector GR.8 files can also be loaded as a complete panel if a larger graphic is needed.¢¢ Completed panels are then saved to disk as 75 sector files. The ramdisk can be used for temporary storage to enable quick access to panels during editing.¢¢ When printing a page the Quickprint option will enable a quick printer dump to check all is well. The Typeset option gives a better quality output. This uses .TYP files which have been converted from a standard font. Sanserif is again automatically loaded as the default. The choice of typeface affects the 80 column text only, larger text is printed as it was originally created. Several Typefaces and fonts are included. The program is set up for a dot graphics capable nine pin Epson and may need adjusting to suit your own brand of printer. Hints on what to change are given.¢¢FURTHER INFORMATION¢¢You may find that the manual reader/printer program has some bugs which need to be fixed. Firstly, in line 120 change the filename PAGEDIT.DOC to PAGEDIT1.DOC, then change SZ to 31535. Change SZ in line 130 to 17560. Note that due to lack of free memory PAGEDIT1 can only load completely with Turbo Basic installed. However, both documents can be printed straight from DOS without this program. If you would prefer to reduce the PAGEDIT1 file to a more manageable size for use with your word processor, then use the file segmenter from New Atari User 66. Please note this program also has a bug, but change GOTO 230 to 220 in line 280 and all will be well.¢
