Hacker Chronicles 2/HACKER2.BIN/090.HARD06.TXT

Text File | 1993-07-30 | 10KB | 161 lines

     Two Viewpoints on Publish It! for Windows

     By Margaret Auld-Louie

     Maker: Timeworks, Inc., 625 Academy Drive,
            Northbrook, IL 60062 708/559-1300,
            1-800-535-9497.

     Price: Street price $70-100.

     Rating: ***Good

     Test System: 33 MHz 386 with 4 MB RAM, 70 MB SCSI hard drive with
            Stacker 2.0, SVGA, QEMM386, Windows 3.1, DOS 5.0.

     Summary: Publish It! for Windows is equivalent to Publish It! 3.0
     for DOS which is being released concurrently. I have been using
     Publish It! for DOS since version 1.2. I also now use PageMaker for
     Windows 4.0 and Microsoft Publisher for Windows 1.0. Publish It!
     doesn't have the wealth of features of PageMaker, which the
     full-time professional desktop publisher would need. However, it
     offers a lot of features for the price. Microsoft Publisher is
     probably easier for novices to use and offers the nifty "Page Wizard"
     feature to automatically create documents for you. MS Publisher is
     less full featured than Publish It!, however and only suitable for
     the novice desktop publisher.

     Publish It! offers an alternative to low-end novice packages and
     high-end, expensive packages.

     Review:

     Publish It! for Windows was released this fall of 1992. It works much
     the same as the DOS version 2, with some Windows enhancements. One
     particularly nice feature is that it ships with Adobe Type Manager,
     although the version it ships with is already outdated as of this
     writing. (It ships with 2.0 and 2.5 is the new version out in December
     1992.) Lots and lots of great typefaces come with it, so Publish It!
     no longer suffers from a lack of fonts. No longer do you have to fill
     up your hard drive with a bunch of bitmapped fonts, with a file for
     each size that you need, as in version 2.0. I already had a lot of
     the same typefaces in True Type versions since I have Corel Draw 3.0,
     however for those of you without lots of fonts, Publish It! for Windows
     would be worth the price just for all the fonts you get. And since
     it's the Windows environment, you can use all those fonts in your
     other Windows applications, like your word processing program.

     Another enhancement to Publish It! is the ability to import more
     graphics types now, such as .CGM, .BMP and .WMF. No longer is Publish
     It! limited to .GEM and .EPS in vector format (so I no longer have
     to convert all my .CGM graphics). Its text file import is kind of
     odd because it defaults to .DOC for  a WordPerfect file extension,
     which is not the default WordPerfect file extension as far as I know.
     WordPerfect doesn't have a standard file extension but I've noticed
     that PageMaker doesn't recognize a WordPerfect document unless it
     ends in .WP5. It's Microsoft Word that uses .DOC for the default
     extension. With this version, Publish It! has added a spell checker
     (at last!), so you don't have to input every single word in a word
     processor and then import into Publish It! to make sure you have no
     spelling errors. In fact, I'm writing this whole review in Publish
     It! (so that I can check features that I'm commenting on). The spell
     checker appears to run through the whole document, regardless of
     where you are in it or how many frames and pages it takes up when
     you start the spell checker.

     A new feature to this version is "Power Text" which is equivalent
     to Word Art in Microsoft Word and Publisher except that it can use
     Adobe fonts rather than being restricted to special fonts named after
     cities in Washington as Word Art is. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear
     to be able to use True Type fonts. Unlike Word Art, which prints out
     with angular curves, Power Text prints out with smooth curves. Also,
     if you have a color printer, you can choose different colors for the
     text. Power Text can be rotated and skewed, adding much needed text
     manipulation functionality to Publish It!.

     Like most new Windows programs, Publish It! has a toolbar at the top
     with icons for commonly used features such as different modes of
     operation, cut, copy, paste, print, open file, save file, view full
     page and view actual size. Also, part of the toolbar changes
     depending on what mode you are in. In text mode, for instance, there
     are pull down lists on it for paragraph style, type style and size.
     (The other modes are frame, paragraph and drawing.) Unlike higher-end
     programs, the toolbar is not customizable. Publish It! for Windows
     uses the VCR-type buttons for moving to the beginning and end of the
     document and to page up
     and down.

     Another improvement with this Windows version is I no longer have
     to put in adjustments to get the document to print out where it's
     supposed to on the page. In the DOS version I had to input +.25"
     horizontal and -.2" vertical. Now I find I have to take out those
     offsets since they're not needed. Also, I am no longer limited to
     the GEM character set which was missing some of the extended
     characters I needed. I find that the "alt" key combinations I use
     in Microsoft Word to get characters such as N and M dashes and
     typographers' quote marks also work in Publish It!. Yet another
     improvement with the Windows version is that if I am moving a frame
     to a location on the page that is not displayed when I start the
     move, Publish It! will now scroll the page up as I move the frame
     with the mouse. In the DOS version, I could only move the frame as
     far as I could see, then I had to stop, use the scroll bars to move
     the page, then start moving the frame again.

     Publish It! still has some of the limitations of the DOS version
     which I find frustrating. One is no pull-down guidelines like
     PageMaker or CorelDraw which I find invaluable in lining up things.
     Another major limitation is that many typestyle options such as
     leading and space above paragraphs can only be accessed through a
     paragraph style. This means that if you need to change the space
     above just one line of text, you have to create a whole new style to
     do it. I have ended up with dozens of styles in 10-12 page
     newsletters (where I am creating ads, charts & tables in addition
     to articles). I get so many styles set up I can't keep track of them!
     I wish it would work like PageMaker where you can do those features
     either within a style or just highlight the text and change
     attributes to that text. Then I don't end up with so many styles.
     A feature of Publish It! that I wish PageMaker would adopt is that
     when you change the text view size, every page is now viewed at
     that size. That makes it easy, for example, to change to full page
     view and then go flipping though each page to get an idea of how
     your document looks. In PageMaker, you have to change the view size
     for each page because it defaults to the size you last viewed that
     particular page at. That makes it tedious at times.

     One of the biggest limitations with Publish It!, I feel, is that they
     don't have a version that will run on a network. With more and more
     companies going to networks, this is going to limit the market for
     Publish It!. This is too bad because it's a very good program for
     the price and a good alternative to PageMaker for anyone who is not
     a professional desktop publisher. My husband and I needed an
     inexpensive desktop publishing program to use in a course at the
     University of Denver which has a network of computers, most without
     hard drives. We tried to run Publish It! (2.0 for DOS) there and it
     just wouldn't work. Timeworks told us that no, they didn't have a
     network version. We ended up going with Microsoft Publisher, which
     runs fine on a network. Publish It! runs quite fast for a Windows
     program-faster than Microsoft Publisher. However, it has a tendency
     to crash on occasion (just like the DOS version of Publish It!)
     which I've never run into with Microsoft Publisher. I've encountered
     this mainly when changing fonts in paragraph styles which I've
     needed to do with all the documents brought over from the DOS version
     because I am using different fonts in Windows.

     Timeworks also might want to consider adding something like the
     Page Wizards that Microsoft Publisher has. They make it much easier
     to get started on a document since they design the template for you,
     based on questions you answer. It's more interactive, fun and easier,
     though, than just loading a template file.

     In summary, Publish It! for Windows is a good program and quite an
     improvement over Publish It! 2.0 for DOS. Fortunately, they released
     Publish It! 3.0 for DOS at the same time, so both platforms are
     supported. Microsoft Publisher is a great program for the novice but
     I feel like I'm doing desktop publishing with one hand tied behind
     my back when I use it. PageMaker is an excellent program but quite
     expensive ($500 street price) and more full-featured than anyone
     other than a professional desktop publisher would need. Publish It!
     thus fills a gap in the middle by offering a lot of functionality
     for a low price.