I want to thank all all the contributors for their help on this digest. The next Publication that we need articles for is the August Newsletter. Articles must be submitted by the 5th of the July for inclusion in the August Newsletter.
Submit your articles to me at:
Gary P. Fields
221 E. Camelback Rd. Suite 1
Phoenix, Arizona
85012
or upload them to the Newsletter File Section of AMUG 1 BBS at 495-1713 or the Newsletter File Section of AMUG II BBS at 947-0587 or call me at home at 263-8746 and we can make some kind of arrangements.
If you or anyone you know would like to advertise in the Newsletter or Digest; please contact Charlie Mort at 345-1244 or myself at 263-8746.
The new comers and beginners meeting now has its own projection system, so come join us and get the latest poop on the club and ask the questions you always wanted to ask. The July meeting will continue our discussion of Utilities. We will also have a guest speaker talking about Viruses.
Thanks to all the contributors for making this publication possible...Keep up the good work!!!
¶
The word is out! Letraset has released DesignStudio, the new page layout program aimed at professional designers, typesetters and publishers. Letraset’s other page layout program, Ready,Set,Go will be developed in another direction—toward businesses and institutions that do not need the higher power that DesignStudio gives.
I have been a user of Ready,Set,Go for several years, so I was quite familiar with its strengths and weaknesses, and I was eager to test the new program. I’ve tested and used other page layout programs, so I feel that I have a fairly good understanding of the field.
When I first saw DesignStudio, my reaction was that it looked just like Ready,Set,Go, with only a few changes. I was suspicious as to whether DesignStudio was really a new program, or just an upgrade of the earlier (less expensive) package. However, as I looked more closely, I found a wealth of new and redesigned features. Now I can see that Letraset has tried very carefully to maintain the “look and feel” of Ready,Set,Go while adding many powerful and professional features.¶
DesignStudio, like Ready,Set,Go, uses a “block” approach to the creation of a page; you create a picture block or a text block and then import the picture or text into it. Both products feature a built-in word processor, complete with spelling checker, Find and Replace functions (including search by font and style), hyphenation and case conversion.¶
The program sports a hefty, indexed manual (approximately 500 pages) in a looseleaf binder, which will make it convenient to update. A tutorial manual (over 100 pages) is also included, as is a disk of tutorial elements (text and graphics). The new price for DesignStudio is $795, which brings it right into line with QuarkXPress and the newly announced (but still unavailable) Pagemaker 4.0.
BEST NEW FEATURES
The Pasteboard metaphor is perhaps the first difference you’ll notice about DesignStudio; there is a clear workspace all around your page. Any kind of object (picture, text block, headline, etc.) can be placed there and then dragged on to the page as needed. Objects which have not been placed directly on a page will remain on the pasteboard when you flip to another page. This way of working is vastly superior for both designing and production. It is one feature of Pagemaker that I have often wished for.¶
An Information Box appears in the bottom-left corner of each document window. This changes to reflect the current condition or activity; when editing text, it shows the font, size, style and leading. While moving or creating an object, it shows coordinates (location, size, degrees of rotation, etc.). When working with a picture, it shows scale. Other information, such as disk activity, is shown here, too.¶
Group. This command ought to be a part of every page layout program (but isn’t). When you have arranged several objects into the exact relationship you want, you can now Group them together, so that they can be moved as a unit from then on (or until you ungroup them). This is great for many uses—imagine grouping captions with pictures.¶
Nudge. This is a feature which has been standard on good drawing programs for quite a while. Select an object or a group of objects (picture block, text block, graphic, etc.) and simply press the arrow keys to move the element(s) in the desired direction. This is great for quick minor adjustments.¶
Rotation in 1/10 degree increments of text and graphic blocks (or groups). Hallelujah! The first real implementation of rotated text and graphics. (You can’t really count Publish-It’s anemic attempt; it was not WYSIWYG.) This can be a huge time saver.
It has been relatively easy for some time to rotate text—just jump to a DA such as Canvas or DeskDraw, type and rotate your text, then copy it and paste it back into your page. Now, DesignStudio has the ability to cut out the intermediate steps. (Rotated text, however, loses its ability to run around graphics.)
Before DesignStudio, rotating a picture—especially a halftone or EPS file—was a much more involved process, including a trip to the program that created the picture, re-saving and re-importing. DesignStudio makes the procedure easy; just select the picture and use the Rotation tool to adjust it interactively. If you need more precision, you can call up the Specifications dialog box and type in a specific degree of rotation.
Flipping any object (including pictures) either horizontally or vertically is another powerful tool. It’s easy to reverse photos for a better balanced page (but you need plenty of RAM). You can even get mirrored text with this one. (I don’t know why you would want to, but it’s there.)
Ghost Dragging. This was another feature that I had always missed in Ready,Set,Go. Several other programs (including Pagemaker and Canvas) have it, and it can be a real help in positioning objects. Here’s how it works: if you grab an object and move it quickly, only the outline of the object shows (as a box) while you’re dragging it. However, if you pause before dragging it, you will get a ghost image of the contents of the block. Although this is slower than the “quick-drag” way, it gives more visual feedback to moving objects. DesignStudio now gives you a choice.
Grids and Guides are both available, as they were in Ready,Set,Go. Default Guides are now on the master page. This means that you can’t accidentally move them. Automatic column generation is a new part of the Guides feature. Additional guides (horizontal and vertical) can be dragged onto the page at the user’s discretion. Horizontal and vertical measuring units can be independent—you might want Picas as your horizontal measure, but inches for vertical measurements.¶
Shaped text blocks are a whole new feature. You can choose from a number of predefined shapes, such as circles, triangles, parallelograms, and octagons.
Picture blocks can also be shaped. Imagine putting a photo into an oval frame.
Automatic fraction generation. This one is a joy. Formatting fractions manually can be a real chore: select the numerator, shift it up several points and choose a reduced size. Next select the denominator, make it the same smaller size, and shift it down a bit. Whew. With DesignStudio, you simply select the fraction and choose “Make Fraction” from the “Text” menu.
Templates. DesignStudio documents can be saved as stationery. If you’ve ever used stationery templates in programs like MacWrite or Canvas, you know how handy they can be. They are even more important in desktop publishing, where newsletters must conform to a consistent format.
Typographic Control. DesignStudio offers control of typographic elements which is, I believe, unsurpassed by any other Mac page layout program. Pagemaker offers half-point sizes, but DS allows point sizes to be specified to a hundredth of a point. Similar controls are available for word spacing, line spacing (or leading, also to 1/100 of a point), letterspacing (kerning and tracking are adjustable to 1/1000 of an em), ragged controls, extensive hyphenation specifications, and more. ¶
Kerning Editor. Kerning refers to the process of adjusting the spaces between letter pairs, and DesignStudio, like Ready,Set,Go, allows you to adjust spacing in several ways. You can select an individual letter and change its relationship with the character preceding it through the keyboard (visually) or with numbers in a dialog box. You can also access the kerning information in commercial fonts with the “Auto Kern” command. However, DesignStudio also lets you edit the kerning tables which are built into fonts, or to add kerning to a font which does not have a kerning table.
Tracking Editor. There are three preset (but editable) levels of tracking that the user can choose from. Tracking means taking a group of letters or words and changing the spacing between the characters universally. This is usually used on headlines to pull the letters closer together for a tighter feel. DesignStudio allows you to select a range of text and choose None, Level 1, Level 2, or Level 3 tracking.
Remember that you can also adjust tracking, kerning and letterspacing manually—you are not limited to the automatic choices. Track kerning is a feature that Pagemaker still does not have (although it has been announced for version 4.0).
Kerning tables and Autotracking levels are saved with each document, which means that they will still be in effect at the service bureau or with another printer. Kerning tables can, however, be imported from another document, so you won’t have to start from scratch. In fact, you can copy kerning info from one font and paste it into another.
Text can also be specified as to color and tint. White (or any other color or tint) text shows up properly over photographs. Case conversion commands allow text to be converted to All Caps, All Lower, Word Caps, Sentence Caps, or Small Caps. The Small Caps option, however, does not maintain capitalization within a selection, and it is not Undo-able.
Object glossary. Ready,Set,Go has a Glossary feature which lets you make a shortcut for frequently used text selections. DesignStudio has added the concept of Object glossaries. Say you have a logo or predefined text block (like “continued on page…”) that you are likely to use repeatedly in a document. You can make an entry that allows you to create a copy of the object, either through a menu selection or by way of a Command-key shortcut. This gives a macro-like ability to objects as well as text entries.¶
There is a new tool for creating editable Polygons. (These can also be used for creating custom runarounds.) Arrows (with editable arrowheads) have been added to the Lines menu. Column Breaks can be added at any point in a text block. A Windows menu allows for picking a document to bring to the front, or allows for tiling of windows.
Text blocks can now have borders and fills—previously you had to manually add a filled or outlined box as a separate object to appear behind a text block. Left, right and paragraph indents can be independently specified for any selection of text.
Compatibility with word processing programs has been extended; there are filters for all versions of Word, all versions of MacWrite, MSWorks, WordPerfect and WriteNow. New filters can be added at any time.
DesignStudio is, of course, compatible with the RIFF graphics file format—after all, the format was brought into use by ImageStudio, another Letraset product. RIFF seems to be so obviously superior to TIFF that one wonders why other programs have not added RIFF compatibility.
DesignStudio also recognizes and prints grayscale PICT2 files. (Pagemaker will not print them properly.) However, the PICT2 format is not an ideal vehicle for grayscale photographs, so it should probably not be used if there is a choice.
Grayscale TIFF and RIFF pictures can be adjusted with the Image Control commands. You can adjust the brightness, contrast, and number of grays, and even get special effects.
OUTPUT
Since DesignStudio is aimed at graphics professionals, there is an emphasis on high-quality output. A number of printer drivers are included which fine tune the program, and there are special features for those who plan on using outside resources such as imagesetters.
Printing to disk is an ability that is more and more desired in this age of service bureaus. DesignStudio adds a PostScript button to the Print dialog box, thus allowing for easy creation of a file which is printed to a disk rather than to a printer. This file, when taken to a service bureau, is less likely to be garbled by a different System File. Several other programs have the ability to create a disk file by holding down a Command key while issuing the Print command, but DesignStudio makes the process much easier.
List Fonts. This is another feature which can solve service bureau problems by helping to avoid font conflicts or missing fonts. DesignStudio can give you a list of all of the fonts which are used by a given document. The list can be saved and, if desired, printed out as an aid to the service bureau.
List Pictures. When you place a picture into a page layout program, there are two ways that the program can record the data. One is by actually including ALL of the picture’s information within the document itself. Unfortunately, this can make for huge documents—imagine a long page layout file that has ten 100K EPS or TIFF files. If the page layout program tried to embed all of the data in one file, the file would be far larger than a floppy. Therefore programs usually do not include actual picture information for TIFF and EPS files in the documents, whereas they might include picture data for smaller Paint and PICT files. Instead, they keep track of the name of the picture file, and load it in when they load the page layout data, or when preparing to print. Some programs even confuse matters by embedding small picture files, and referencing larger ones. Often you have no idea how the program is storing the information. When it’s time to go to the service bureau, you need to take some, but perhaps not all, of the picture files which are used in your document. DesignStudio can give you a list of the pictures (and their locations) which you will need to pack up.
Color. DesignStudio supports spot color and the Pantone Matching System. A set of colors can be customized. The color menu itself can even be customized to show a user-defined set of colors. At print time, you can specify that separations be printed out, with or without knockouts. Registration marks and color names can be positioned independently. Color TIFF files can be imported and displayed (although color separations of photos is not supported).
There have been many additions and improvements aimed specifically at imagesetter output
(Linotronics, VariTyper, etc.): custom page sizes to 99 inches deep, transverse letter-size pages, special printer description files, and others. I have not been able to test all of these new features.
OLD FEATURES and IMPROVEMENTS
DesignStudio’s Style Sheets, like Ready,Set,Go’s, can be applied at the character or word level, rather than only at the paragraph level (like Pagemaker and Quark). After using this method, you’ll wonder why it was ever otherwise. DesignStudio adds named styles as a menu selection. Two new commands called Copy Format and Apply Format extend the power of text formatting.
Leading controls have been improved; you can now choose between automatic leading, or from a set of predefined incremental choices, or (as noted earlier) you can specify leading in thousandths of a point. Letraset has always been a leader in text formatting controls.
The leading choices in the submenu seem to be fixed—that is, the choices do not change with the point size of the selected text. I would rather have seen context-sensitive choices here; if you are working with 18 point type, for instance, why not have choices from 16 to 24 point?
Vertical justification is held over from Ready,Set,Go 4.5, although its interface has been improved. Vertical justification allows for even feathering of lines (or paragraphs) of text vertically in a text block. This gives an easy way to make sure several columns come out at the same place at the bottom of the page. This used to be a chore when you had to experiment tediously with tiny changes in leading.
(For those who are especially picky, Justification specs can be kept at a “standard” default, or adjusted “professionally” with minimum and maximum percentages of both character and word spacing.)¶
Smart Paste is another feature that ought to be a part of every page layout software, but isn’t. When you cut or copy an object from one page, and then paste it onto another page, it will appear in the same position that it originally occupied. Most programs just plunk it down in the middle of the screen, which is the one place you don’t want it. DesignStudio’s intelligent approach to pasting can be a real time-saver.
Editable Thumbnails are also available. Smart Duplication is still here, making many tasks easier with its advanced step-and-repeat shortcuts. The Alignment command adds another level of ease. The Move… command is still available. Move Forward and Move Backward have been added to the previous Move To Front and Move To Back commands. Double-clicking any object (or pressing Command-M) brings up a Specifications dialog box which allows you to adjust just about any aspect you can imagine.
DesignStudio retains all of the power and precision that set Ready,Set,Go apart from Pagemaker. Placement of objects can be specified to one ten-thousandth of an inch(!), and objects can be resized to any percentage. But this power remains easy and intuitive to use, thus distancing Letraset products from the more mechanical approach demanded by QuarkXPress.
It should go without saying that DesignStudio will open multiple files. (There is still at least one major layout program which still does not, but we’re not naming names.)
There are many other features in DesignStudio which make life a little easier. For instance, if a font which was used in a document is not currently available to the system, a dialog box appears asking if you would like to assign a replacement or close the document in order to install the font. A similar dialog appears when needed picture files are missing. DesignStudio does this when you open the document. Some other programs announce this problem later—when you’re ready to print.
Nit PICTing
PICT cropping is flaky when reductions are involved—you might not get what you see. Tech Support is aware of this problem and is working on a fix.(This has apparently been fixed in the 1.01 maintenance release) In the meantime, there is an easy work-around, available from Letraset’s toll-free, unlimited support phones. (There’s a nasty rumor going around that Letraset might be modifying their toll-free support policy. We’d sure hate to see that happen.)
Screen updating can still be a bit quirky at times—deleting a line of text will sometimes cause the text below that point to scramble slightly, and moving a rule occasionally leaves a screen artifact. These are temporary and minor problems. Scrolling away and back again always corrects the rendering, but this is one holdover from Ready,Set,Go that I wish had been corrected.(This has been fixed in the 1.01 maintenance release)
DesignStudio does use a lot of memory. Shipped from the factory, the MultiFinder partition is set at 1 meg, but I had to set it higher in order to rotate pictures. This should not be a problem; serious desktop publishers will have more than 1 meg of RAM. If not, they might be advised to stick with Ready,Set,Go or one of the less powerful packages.
A number of menu selections had to be moved to accommodate new commands, and some of these might be confusing to old Ready,Set,Go users: Glossaries and Styles each have two separate commands under two different menus. Font, size, and styles are now chosen from submenus (I dislike submenus), but there are more selections available in many categories.
Finally, I feel some confusion about where DesignStudio is going to place a page that I’m viewing for the first time. It often positions the upper left corner of a document in the middle of the window, thus leaving three-quarters of my monitor showing empty pasteboard (This has been fixed in the 1.01 maintenance release). This is inconvenient. I almost never want to be there. Of course, I can scroll wherever I want, but I would have preferred a default setting that placed the upper left corner of the page in the upper left corner of the window. Or at least a command key that would put me there. Maybe I’ll get used to this. On the other hand, Letraset tech support tells me that an alternative is being considered for the next upgrade.
DesignStudio will open files made with Ready,Set,Go 4.5, but not those created with earlier versions of RSG. You’ll want to keep your Ready,Set,Go application around if you have any old files that you might need to open.
Conclusions
DesignStudio represents another major step forward in page layout software. While retaining the ease of use that has been a hallmark of Ready,Set,Go, Letraset has added a host of truly professional new features to a list that was already impressive. DesignStudio is far more powerful than many other packages, but it achieves this power without forcing a mechanistic approach on users. The flexibility makes DesignStudio an excellent design tool, but the power for production is there when you need it. Many of the new features make DesignStudio a delight to use, and I recommend it highly.
System Requirements
Recommended: Macintosh SE/30 or II series (color monitor optional), 2 megs RAM, 40 meg hard disk.
Minimum: Macintosh Plus, 1 meg RAM, 20 meg hard disk (limited performance), and current Macintosh operating system.
Retail: $795. Current Ready,Set,Go owners may upgrade for $100 for a limited time.
(Letraset has announced that RSG 5.0 will be released later this year.)
This is the Page Layout program usd for AMUG’s Newsletter and this Digest.
DesignStudio is available through AMUG for $150 dollars.
Send your $150 to:
AMUG
718 E. Campbell Ave.
Gilbert, Arizona 85234
The word is out! Letraset has released DesignStudio
The Pasteboard metaphor is perhaps the first difference you’ll notice about DesignStudio; there is a clear workspace all around your page
Rotation in 1/10 degree increments of text and graphic blocks (or groups). Hallelujah!
Automatic fraction generation.... With DesignStudio, you simply select the fraction and choose “Make Fraction” from the “Text” menu.
DesignStudio offers control of typographic elements which is, I believe, unsurpassed by any other Mac page layout program.
DesignStudio has added the concept of Object glossaries
DesignStudio’s Style Sheets can be applied at the character or word level, rather than only at the paragraph level. After using this method, you’ll wonder why it was ever otherwise.
Vertical justification allows for even feathering of lines (or paragraphs) of text vertically in a text block.
Placement of objects can be specified to one ten-thousandth of an inch(!), and objects can be resized to any percentage.
DesignStudio represents another major step forward in page layout software.
DesignStudio is available through AMUG for $150 dollars.
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