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1993-04-26
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Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet
From: aquirt@bnr.ca (Alan A.R. Quirt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Subject: REVIEW: Final Copy II, Release 2
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Date: 27 Apr 1993 02:22:33 GMT
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett
Lines: 366
Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator)
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <1ri5d9$ior@menudo.uh.edu>
Reply-To: aquirt@bnr.ca (Alan A.R. Quirt)
NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu
Keywords: word processor, graphics, commercial
PRODUCT NAME
Final Copy II, Release 2 (Feb 25, 1993).
USA version.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION
A mid-range graphical word processor with exceptionally high-quality
printing using proprietary outline fonts. Release 2 adds landscape printing
and support for Postscript Type 1 Fonts and standard Amiga Compugraphic
fonts.
AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION
Name: Softwood, Inc.
Address: PO Box 50178
Phoenix, AZ 85076
USA
Telephone: (800) 247-8330 (USA and Canada)
(602) 431-9151
LIST PRICE
$159 (US). By mailorder, approximately $90 plus shipping.
An upgrade from Release 1 is available for $20 plus $5 shipping.
SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
HARDWARE
2 floppies or Hard disk (strongly recommended).
1 MB RAM (more if using many fonts in a document).
Barely adequate speed with a basic 68000 processor.
SOFTWARE
Requires Kickstart 1.3 or newer.
COPY PROTECTION
None.
Installs easily on a hard drive using Commodore's Installer. The
Installer for the Release 2 update is not set up to update an existing hard
disk installation. It insists on creating a new drawer to hold the program;
so if your disk is as full as mine, you may have to delete at least part of
your original installation before you install the new version.
MACHINE USED FOR TESTING
Amiga 2000HD with 52 Mbyte Quantum drive.
1 Mbyte Chip RAM. 2 Mbytes Fast RAM on A2091 disk controller.
AmigaDOS 2.04 (Kickstart 37.175, Workbench 37.67)
Commodore 1080 Monitor.
Printers: HP DeskJet 550C, Panasonic 9-pin.
SUMMARY
Here's one more view of Final Copy II. Like previous reviewers, I am
glad I bought it and consider it to be excellent value. The best new feature
in Release 2 is support for Postscript Type 1 fonts.
Pros:
- Unbeatable output quality on any printer, from 9-pin to laser.
- Fine tune text: kerning, leading, width scaling, and slanting.
- Style tags let you easily play with the look of a document.
- The structured drawing tools work well for simple shapes.
- Prints bit-mapped graphics well, and flows text smoothly around them.
- Handles left and right pages, at layout time and print time.
- Nearly all Softwood fonts have full support for accented characters.
- Outline fonts are used on-screen, so any size looks good.
- Release 2 supports Amiga Compugraphic and Postscript Type 1 fonts.
Cons:
- There is no Undo function, so save your work often.
- Multi-column layouts apply to the whole document.
- Layout is paragraph-based, not frame-based. Not a desktop publisher.
- Graphics always have fixed page positions: they cannot float with text.
THE FONTS
Final Copy II release 1 had no support at all for standard Amiga
fonts. That turned out to be a marketing problem, so Softwood added support
in Release 2 for Workbench 2.1 (or higher) Compugraphic fonts. I doubt I will
ever use them. I could not try them because I am still running AmigaDOS
2.04, but the upgrade documentation warns that quality is poorer than Nimbus
Q. From my experience with PageSetter, I expect Compugraphic fonts to look
fine on the screen, and to print with smooth shapes but ugly letter spacing
(kerning). To judge by comments on the network, other programs such as
ProWrite that use Compugraphic fonts have similar problems.
I did try the Type 1 font support, using the two full disks of public
domain fonts that Softwood is supplying free with the upgrade until the end
of April. The upgrade documentation warns you that the quality of public
domain fonts is spotty. If this sample is typical, I agree. Most have no
accented characters, some have no lower case, some have no numbers, and the
otherwise attractive Middleton font is missing lower case letter 'x'. The
general look of many of them is less than professional. Still, I'm planning
to keep about 15 out of 40 on my hard disk. Some are fun novelties, such as
PostCrypt, a Halloween font with mossy letters. By the way, on my slow
Amiga, Final Copy takes about 30 seconds to load a Type 1 font, and
rendering seems a bit slower than Nimbus Q both on screen and to printer.
Nimbus Q fonts in Final Copy render faster than Compugraphic fonts in
PageSetter II, and print quality is better. With my old Panasonic 9-pin
printer, characters are as smooth as the printer's best built-in fonts, but
the printer's narrowest lines are too thick for some fonts. With my new
DeskJet 550C and the right paper, the overall impression is as professional
as Postscript laser printing.
You cannot find public domain Amiga Nimbus Q typefaces on bulletin
boards, but the program comes with a generous selection. Softwood counts
typefaces the way printer makers do, claiming 35. I count 8 font families,
each supplied in plain, italic, bold, and bolditalic, plus 3 single-style
fonts. Most are clones of standard Postscript laser printer fonts: Avante
Garde, Bookman, Courier, Helvetica, Palatino, New Century Schoolbook, and
Times. You also get the bland sans-serif font "SoftSans". The specialty
fonts are Symbol, Old English, and a clone of the Postscript old-style font
Zapf Chancery. The serif italic fonts are true italics, not just slanted.
Softwood sells four font sets, each containing 25 name-brand
typefaces from ITC and Letraset. A large poster included with the program
shows you samples of all of them. They cost less than the going rate for
licensed fonts. List price is $100 per set, but a typical mailorder price
is $60, and Softwood has had specials. In comparison, Adobe's list price is
$149 (introductory price $59) for each set of 8 to 10 Postscript typefaces
that it sells for Adobe Type Manager.
You should budget for at least one font set. I decided that the
basic serif and sans-serif fonts were equally attractive in all the sets, so
I chose Set 1 to get Zapf Dingbats. The joined script fonts Balmoral and
Rage Italic are good for certificates. Bible Script looks like calligraphy.
Dolmen is ultra black, great for posters. The 27 typefaces in Set 1
(including surprise extra weights of Bauhaus and Kabel) are equal to at
least 40 from Adobe, because Softwood doesn't need italic versions of the
sans-serif ones; you can slant any font. There's also no need for condensed
versions when you can scale the width of any font. It is great to be able
to scale a title to 94% so that it fits perfectly on one line.
PRINTING
Typical print speed is a leisurely 5 minutes per page with either of
my printers, using their highest quality graphics mode. Release 1 had
trouble multi-tasking during printing, but Release 2 is fine (though Final
Copy itself does nothing else while it prints). By choosing a lower density
graphics mode (150 dpi on the DeskJet) I got reasonable rough printouts in
two to three minutes a page. Forget about what Final Copy calls draft
printing. It uses your printer's built-in fonts for speed, but totally
ignores your page layout.
Release 2 adds the ability to print in landscape (wide) mode. First
the good news -- it works, and output quality is fine. But it is far too
slow to be practical on an unaccelerated Amiga. A simple certificate that
normally printed in under five minutes took over 33 minutes on the DeskJet in
landscape mode. Setup is also a bit awkward; you have to define a custom
page wider than it is high, and rearrange your margins. For example, the one
labelled "right margin" controls the top of your sideways page.
I've tried a little colour printing. Using public domain print
drivers, the colours were murky and the printout had obvious raster lines.
Using the DeskJet driver from Wolf Faust's Studio package, the qual