Long time Macintosh users will remember when Aldus bought Silicon Beach Software, the publisher of SuperPaint and Digital Darkroom. When they did, Aldus also got a new, low end, page layout program under development that was later released as Personal Press. Now in version 2.0, Personal Press competes with Publish It! Easy from Timeworks (see the January 1992 issue of Mac Monitor for Barton Brown’s review of Publish It! Easy) and vies for your attention in a crowded market of powerful word processors. You may want to re-read the Personal Press (version 1.0) review by L. Frank Turovich, of the Arizona Macintosh Users Group, in the December 1991 issue of Mac Monitor. It’s time for an update.
What is Personal Press?
Aldus is well known as the publisher of PageMaker, the professional page layout program that started desktop publishing on the Macintosh. They had to be cautious when introducing Personal Press so as not to intrude on PageMaker’s rather large market share. To position Personal Press as too powerful a program would hurt PageMaker sales, but it is clear that not everyone needs a $500 page layout program to handle simple flyers, church newsletters, and the like. And so there is Personal Press.
Personal Press is well named as it is an entry level page layout program with enough features to handle many tasks. It is System 7 savvy, which means it supports those neat System 7 things such as subscribe (but no publish), Apple events, TrueType, Balloon Help, virtual memory, 32-bit addressing, and Quicktime. Even though Personal Press is more PageMaker’s kid brother than a stand-alone powerhouse, it offers many abilities I hope we’ll see later in PageMaker. Standout features such as its Link Navigator for following stories appearing on different pages through a document, Posted Notes for editorial comments, and collapsible floating palettes are very nice. Its AutoCreate automatic page-composition capacity is unique and powerful.
Interface
Floating palettes are used extensively in Personal Press. Fortunately for users of small screen Macintoshes (small defined as less than full page these days), all palettes can be collapsed to a title bar and expanded again with just a click on the palette’s zoom box.
The on-line help system is easy to use. Balloon help is available to those running System 7 (come on, y’all, make the switch!); everyone gets the interactive menu help feature where selecting an inactive menu item gives you a dialog box explaining why it’s inactive. Just press Command-?, or choose Help from the Apple menu, and a list of help topics is displayed.
Silicon Beach has violated no user interface norms that I saw while working with Personal Press. But, for some reason, dragging objects or guides is not mirrored on the rulers to let you know where you are. Standard keyboard menu equivalents are supported (are you listening, Microsoft?).
Most Personal Press commands have preview areas in their dialog boxes. These areas show you the effect choices made in the dialog box are having on the selected item. In the case of importing graphics or text, a snippet of the text or a thumbnail of the graphic are shown. This is very handy and avoids mistakes.
Only one document can be opened at a time! This must be an unwritten requirement for Aldus page layout programs; even their top-of-the-line PageMaker shares this limitation. I don’t think this makes sense in today’s System 7, multi-megabyte world.
Basic Feature Set
Personal Press uses a design approach similar to QuarkXPress and DesignStudio/ReadySetGo in that objects are the building blocks for page layout. Objects to hold text or graphics, lines, rectangles, and ovals are created using the tools in the Main Tools palette. Because all objects are treated the same, they can all be scaled, rotated, or moved using the same techniques.
Text entry works as expected. After drawing a rectangle to hold text, it can either be imported or typed in directly. A link tool allows different text blocks to be connected and for text to flow from one to another. Import filters for documents created by Microsoft Word, Microsoft Works, Microsoft Write, MacWrite, MacWrite II, WriteNow 2.0, RTF (Rich Text Format), ASCII (text only), and text from PageMaker documents are provided.
The built-in word processor is more than capable of handling almost all of your text input needs. Find and replace can be done by font, size, and style; there is a spelling checker and thesaurus available, as well as automatic hyphenation. Typographic control is simplistic with letter, word, line, and paragraph spacing adjustable in one point increments. This is probably sufficient for many needs, but does not stand up well to the “real” page layout programs. It’s also too bad that you can’t display text invisibles such as spaces, tabs, and carriage returns.
Custom styles are provided after a fashion. Styles here work like they do in MacWrite II. You can specify a set of text characteristics as a style and apply them to text. Changing those characteristics later does not change text with that style applied, you must make manual changes. Actually, you cannot edit style sheets at all; they must be deleted, re-created, and re-named. Search and replace by style helps some here, but style sheets in the traditional sense would be welcome. There is no provision for paragraph-related style settings such as alignment or paragraph spacing.
Setting tabs and indents for a paragraph must be done by dragging marks on a ruler as there is no method for entering placement precisely. Hyphenation settings are publication based but can be turned on or off paragraph by paragraph. No widow or orphan control is provided. Text wrapping works well and can be done around the frame or shape of an object. Why can’t PageMaker do that automatically?
Basic graphic elements can be created with ease. Their line style and pattern, as well as their fill pattern can be set as well. Unfortunately none of these patterns are true percent gray scales; they are just the normal QuickDraw bitmapped patterns.
Rotation and scaling tools are excellent, allowing text or graphics to be rotated to any angle (in one degree increments) or scaling to be done in one percent increments. Again, why can’t PageMaker do that? With such a nice set of graphics features, I find it odd that there are no provisions for grouping.
Special Features
Copy fitting, the process of making a block of text fit the area desired, can be a troublesome task. Personal Press handles this common chore easily. The Copy Fit command from the Text menu allows you to adjust text to fit vertically within its block by changing character size, line spacing, and paragraph spacing. You click OK, and the rest is automatic.
Support for color is very minimal. You may define a color palette of only eight spot colors out of the available sixteen million and can be selected from the Macintosh color wheel. This limitation may be appropriate for a low end publishing package; we’re not talking about QuarkXPress here.
Gray scale tools are available for adjusting contrast and brightness as well as the image’s gray map. Control of halftones is good, screen angle, frequency, and dot shape can all be changed. An advanced halftone feature allows adjustment of focus and exposure, producing improved results on low-end printers.
I like the built-in scrapbook-like workbook. The workbook is a multi-page palette that will hold text and graphics and allows easy, one click, movement into or out of. The workbook is saved with the publication and belongs to it; I would like to access workbooks from other publications, but this is not possible.
Posted Notes are to business as pencils are to paper. We all love to stick these things on our desk, telephone, and monitor; Personal Press lets you stick them on your document. This makes it easy to stick notes to writers or proofreaders right on the item of interest. The posted notes can be hidden and printed.
Something I would like to see more graphic applications use is Personal Press’s Equals tool. This clever tool lets you select one item and change another item’s dimensions to match the first. It also applies the first item’s line style, line and fill pattern, color, and shadow characteristics to the second. Neat!
Moving from text block to text block in the same story spread over several pages is easy with the Link Navigator. Just select a story and use the arrows to click to the next or previous part of the story. This is great for newsletter projects where stories are continued on non-consecutive pages.
Extensions Through Additions
As is becoming more popular, Personal Press allows the user to install add-on software components to enhance the program’s feature set. All available additions are shown in a single palette. Confusingly, many commands are available both on the additions palette and in the pull down menus.
There are lots of commands in the additions list. There are so many that the additions palette has an index of general areas such as object commands, edit menu shortcuts, and settings. By clicking on the topic, a list of commands in that area is shown. This is difficult to do smoothly, since you are forced to memorize which topic has which command, and you must keep switching back to the index to change commands.
Several of the additions are very nice indeed. How about automatic pull quotes and captions? You can select a group of objects by their color, line style, size, etc. There is even an initial caps function to create drop caps effects in several styles. This is similar to PageMaker’s (but better), as the drop cap cannot be edited with the text; it has been automatically cut out and placed as a graphic object. Too bad you cannot undo the actions of additions commands.
AutoCreate is Great!
Here is a feature those novice graphic artists among us will love. Personal Press is the first page layout program I am aware of that can automate the publication creation process. Many have said that desktop publishing opened the doors allowing many untrained people to produce ugly documents. Call it artistic snobbery, but The New Yorker magazine looks good not by accident, but because of well-trained, experienced artists.
The AutoCreate function of Personal Press gives you a group of templates to handle the bulk of normal business document requirements. Included are settings for brochures, calendars, certificates, flyers, greeting cards, labels, and newsletters. There is also a complete business identity template to create business cards, envelopes, facsimile forms, letters, and memos. Each template is available in four styles—traditional, modern, elegant, and new wave.
To create a document, you just choose the template and style required and click OK. Personal Press does the rest. When it is done you have a completely formatted document. In fact, as the process proceeds, you can identify the text and graphics to be used, and they are imported automatically. You even get a preview of each decision in dialog boxes as you go.
AutoCreate is much more involved than I can describe here. It works well, provides some level of flexibility and, in an office where documents must be done quickly and accurately by us regular folks, should be a godsend. Remember, not every business can afford the services of a graphic designer to make a business identity package for them. It may not create documents equal to a professional’s, but AutoCreate will produce good looking results quickly.
Speed
Perhaps the biggest downfall of Personal Press is its speed—more properly, the lack thereof. It doesn’t feel very frisky on my Macintosh IIci with 2MB allocated to it! For low-end publishing, when low end Macintoshes are likely to be used, it may simply be too slow.
Replacing text is glacial. Really, anything that requires text to be reflowed requires several second’s wait. I found myself changing the way I naturally work to avoid doing those things that took so long. It became annoying. Response is just too slow for use on large documents; I was working with a thirteen page manual and found it very painful. Everything except typing seemed stuck in molasses. I think Aldus will have to do better here.
Other
For some reason, Personal Press does not use the Aldus folder that PageMaker and FreeHand create in the System Folder. This is a special place for preference files, dictionaries, and the like to keep them grouped together and out of the way. Silicon Beach has chosen the create a PPPouch folder to accomplish the same thing that must be in the same place as the application. I guess Silicon Beach and Aldus have not completed merged.
The Technical Support phone number is not toll-free. For novice users, at which I assume Personal Press is aimed, toll free support would be a great advantage. Maybe Silicon Beach doesn’t want a bunch of us page layout wannabes using up their technical support staff’s time.
Summary
I really wanted to like Personal Press. The Macintosh world needs an inexpensive page layout program so that “the rest of us” can get into desktop publishing without having to come up with $500+ to join the fraternity. The interface is nice and has some touches that others could do well imitating. The feature set is good, especially for the price. But Personal Press is a pain to use! Everything feels so slow that creativity is lost. Silicon Beach, if you speed this thing up, you have a big winner.
Macintosh Plus or above with 1MB RAM (2MB with System 7)
System 6.0.3 or later.
A hard drive and one 800KB floppy drive.
Needs a minimum of 1500KB to run.
Takes up about 4MB fully installed.
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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:
