A new book from Peachpit Press is always cause for rejoicing in the Macintosh community. The company has built a reputation as the best publisher in the field, which is especially impressive considering the youth of the firm. When I recently received four new books from them, I felt like calling my friends and throwing a party. What is it that makes Peachpit books so special? One of my students said it very well—“I’m waiting for Peachpit to do a book on Photoshop. Their books are fun to read—almost like a novel.”
Manuals are notoriously dull, and most third-party instructional books are not much better—dry and humorless. With Peachpit books, you feel as if you’re getting the real nitty-gritty from an expert, but one who happens to be an alert and responsive human being.
The Little Mac Word Book
I settled down with Helmut Kobler’s book first. I have looked at Microsoft Word off and on over the years, and even bought a copy once. However, I always became dissatisfied with it because of its well-known lack of adherence to standard Macintosh interface guidelines. It’s also widely recognized that Microsoft products are among the first to break when Apple brings out a new system. MacWrite II has always been powerful enough for my modest needs, and its ease-of-use suits me; I dislike having to look up seldom-used commands in a manual. (I often can’t even find a manual when I really need it.).
But I had seen notices in the press that Word 5.0 was different. The fact that Microsoft had (finally) added a “Select All” command seemed to suggest that they had seen the error of their ways. Maybe, I thought, they could get it right on the fifth try.
Kobler’s book got right to the heart of things with its preface titled “What’s New With 5.0.” In the space of just a few pages, I found out all of the new or revised features: grammar checking, thesaurus, the ribbon, borders, drawing tools, Find and Replace text attributes, drag and drop text editing, an extensive Preferences command, and lots more. I jumped in.
After several days of reading the book and tinkering with the program, I found that, yes, Word 5.0 was an improvement; and, yes, The Little Mac Word Book was a valuable guide to its operation. Most of the questions I had seemed to relate to Microsoft’s design decisions rather than to a lack of information in the book. For instance, as a graphics-oriented user, I was somehat disappointed that the book did not explain how to scale pictures a precise amount, or how to crop a picture at the top or left side. When I finally got around to looking it up in Microsoft’s 800+ page manual, I realized why; it would have scared off any beginner. Perhaps Kobler made a wise decision after all.
There are certainly many interesting new features in Word 5, and the book does a good job of covering them. Drag and Drop text editing is a radical new concept. It’s hard enough to get used to (and so rife with possibilities for really scrambling your text) that I suspect many people will simply turn this feature off. We can truly thank Microsoft for the ability to ignore or modify features through its expanded Preferences command. Again, the book does a good job of describing all of the Preference options.
Kobler’s book is not intended to be a substitute for the manual; it is aimed at new users who want to get up to speed quickly, but it will also be valuable for previous Word users who want a quick introduction to the new features of version 5.0. Aside from a few typos, and a mistaken description of printing envelopes on a LaserWriter II, I did not find any problems with the book.
If your work demands that you have indexing and table of contents features, then Word might be the best choice for you. If you decide to use Word, then by all means treat yourself to The Little Mac Word Book.
QuarkXPress Tips and Tricks
David Blatner has done it again. Not content with his success with The QuarkXPress Book (standard reading for designers in these parts), or Desktop Publisher’s Survival Kit (reviewed in last month’s Monitor), now he’s back with QuarkXPress Tips and Tricks, another don’t-miss title.
Blatner’s first book took us on a tour of the powerful and popular DTP program and surpassed the manual in both readability and general usefulness. The second book took a more generic approach: concepts, ideas, tips, and techniques which are helpful with any page layout program. In the new book, co-authored by Eric Taub, Blatner returns to what is obviously his first love: QuarkXPress. This one is neither a tour of a program nor an overview of the concepts of the field—this is simply the biggest collection of QuarkXPress tips and techniques that you’ll find anywhere. All of the best tips from the earlier book are here, plus over 180 new tips. Many of these are undocumented elsewhere.
Quark is a powerful program, but it is hardly known for its ease of use. Indeed, the program has lots of oddities, perhaps justifying its nickname of “QuirkXPress.” Blatner and Taub have used Quark for a long time, and they’ve also talked with a lot of other design professionals, looking for shortcuts, hidden features, and workarounds.
Did you know, for instance, that pictures in oval picture boxes can take two to three times as long to print as those in regular frames? Do you know how to create guides that reach across a spread? How about the relative benefits of putting spare parts in a library, as opposed to leaving them on the Pasteboard. These are just a few of the dozens of tips in the first chapter—and there are ten chapters!
The book has a good index to help you find things when you’re in a bind, but you might just want to sit down and read it from cover to cover to make sure you don’t miss anything. One appendix lists Quark’s keyboard commands—seven pages worth. Another appendix lists resources you might want to use with Quark: extensions (both commercial and shareware), other software likely to make your work easier, even hardware and user group connections. A third appendix lists XPress Tags, for those who want more control over importing and exporting text.
If you use QuarkXPress, this book is mandatory reading. If you use PageMaker, this book might convince you to switch.
Desktop Publishing Secrets
Here’s yet another book to add to the rapidly growing list of titles aimed at electronic publishers. This one is a collection of tips and techniques taken from the pages of Publish magazine. Publish has been around for over five years serving a non-platform-specific readership, meaning that the magazine covers the field of DTP on both Mac and DOS machines.
As an aside, don’t you wonder why anybody bothers doing desktop publishing on anything other than a Mac? Every year, Publish sponsors a design contest, open to users of any computer. This year, all 22 winners used Mac equipment. I don’t remember a single DOS-produced publication ever winning a prize! At The Savannah College of Art and Design, we have a lot of calls for trained desktop publishers, but very nearly all of these job descriptions specify Macintosh training.
Anyhow, I was afraid that this book would be less valuable because half of the tips would be devoted to PCs. I was pleasantly surprised as I read through the book, skipping forward and backward and following whims; many of the tips relate to both platforms. You won’t want to read this one from cover to cover, but you’re likely to keep coming back.
The book is broken down into chapters dealing with various aspects of the subject: Type and Typography, Word Processing, Graphics, Page Layout, Presentations, Hardware, System Software, Paper and Printing, business matters, and more. There’s an overview which functions as a guide to the layout of the book, but a separate 17-page table of contents really helps you find things by listing all of the tips by title. The index in the back can also help you find the answer you’re looking for. There are 78 tips specifically aimed at PageMaker users, but only 24 for XPress. There were no (0) entries specific to DesignStudio. (Poo!) 75 entries were indexed for Ventura, the leading PC page layout program. (We noticed that two of the three editors use PCs.) Of course, many other programs are covered, from word processors to utilities. Even if you discount the third of the book (approximately) that is devoted to the PC, Mac users will still find a lot of good information here.
Zen and the Art of Resource Editing
Here’s one for those hardy souls that aren’t satisfied with the Mac’s ease-of-use and standard interface. ResEdit is a program that allows you to change the way your computer—and the programs you use on it—work. ResEdit stands for RESource EDITor. Resources are the building blocks that make up everything that happens on your Mac, and ResEdit lets you change them. This is not an activity recommended for beginners, and even experienced Mac users are advised to proceed with caution.
Common resources include sounds, fonts, icons, cursors, the text in dialog boxes (even the placement and size of dialog boxes), and many more. Want to add command-key shortcuts to menus in your programs? This book will show you how to use ResEdit to do so.
Zen and the Art of Resource Editing comes with a disk which includes the most recent version of ResEdit, plus over 1500K of resources and utilities. Want color icons with System 6? It’s in there!
Subtitled The BMUG Guide to ResEdit, this is actually the third edition of the book. BMUG is the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group, one of the most highly respected organizations in the Mac community, perhaps best known for its huge twice-a-year newsletter, which regularly runs over 400 pages. The book is quite up to date; it has been revised and enlarged to include System 7’s new features.
In the Foreward, Cliff Stoll states, “The really wild thing about ResEdit is that you can use it on any Mac program. Just zap your resources here and there, and all of a sudden your Mac is really your Mac—an extension of your personality.” This is a book that will appeal to hackers—and there’s at least a little bit of hacker in most of us.
The Little Mac Word Book by Helmut Kobler. $15.95 (238 pages).
QuarkXPress Tips and Tricks by David Blatner and Eric Taub. $21.95 (320 pages).
Desktop Publishing Secrets, edited by Robert C. Eckhardt, Robert Weibel, and Ted Nace. $27.95 (494 pages).
Zen and the Art of Resource Editing, 3rd Edition by Derrick Schneider, Hans Hansen, and Noah Potkin. $24.95 (192 pages, includes disk).
Peachpit Press
2414 Sixth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
(800) 283-9444
Late Flash: Peachpit Press has announced that they will be publishing and distributing Mac books from Goldstein & Blair. The Macintosh Bible is one of the best-selling books for the Mac, and Peachpit is one of the best publishers. Looks like a great marriage.
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The article above is reprinted from Mac Monitor, the newsletter of The Savannah Macintosh Users Group. It may be reprinted in a single issue of newsletters published by non-profit user groups. Payment shall consist of a single issue of the newsletter in which the article appears, sent to the following address:
