The Garret
The Joy of Printing
Ed
Hall, AC Staff Columnist
Shelf Space Crunch
I recently experienced a storage problem known to all computer owners: lack of shelf space. Over the years I've accumulated so many magazines and manuals and catalogs and printouts that I either had to build a new wing on the house or start throwing things away. Simple choice, really. Unfortunately the bank refused to give me a loan, so I had to start tossing stuff.
The logical place to begin was a row of boxes, mostly games, which filled the topmost shelf. The boxes were empty, their contents safely stowed away in handier locations. As I took them down, a rush of memories flooded over me. There was still magic in their fantastic covers, though the sleek starships and brawny warriors turned out to be little more than stick figures on my computer screen. Somehow, in those days, it didn't seem to matter.
You remember how those early games were packaged? Breakfast cereal-size boxes with the cartridges hidden inside like prizes. Either Atari's marketing crew came from Kellogg's, or they figured a big price required a big box.
Origin Of DTP
Then I pulled out a yellow box which was, if you can believe it, even larger than those early Atari games. But here I paused, for this one really did deserve a big box. Like VisiCalc, it was one of those landmark programs that changed the face of computing. I'm referring of course to Print Shop, a product that's been around so long we've forgotten how revolutionary it was. Newer and better programs have emerged since then, but none has been easier to use.
I have a very clear memory of the first time I used Print Shop, of the elation I felt when, after a few simple keypresses, my printer cranked out a birthday card. My sense of accomplishment was out of all proportion to the unimpressive little card I had produced. A cynic would have drily observed that Hallmark had nothing to fear from such efforts. The cynic would have been wrong. As the parent of several young children, I've noticed that more birthday parties are now announced by homeprinted cards than purchased ones. But the importance of Print Shop goes far beyond mere greeting cards. Print Shop was the sire of a whole new industry: desktop publishing, or DTP.
Back in the mid-1980s, it was DTP that saved Apple's bacon. The Mac was little more than a yuppie toy until PageMaker from Aldus gave it and the Apple LaseWriter a powerful raison d'etre. Had the Mac gone down the drain, the graphical interface may soon have followed. The ST and Amiga may not have been strong enough to champion it, and at that time Windows was little more than a hump on the back of MS-DOS.
But DTP's importance does not stop there; it should bring to mind one of the most powerful catchphrases in the world: freedom of the press. In these days of multinational corporations and media conglomerates, of newspaper chains owned by tycoons like Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black, software publishing programs are powerful antidotes. They ratify the populist aspirations of the many visionaries who assisted at the birth of the personal computer. They recall names from the '70s like Computer Lib, Community Memory, and the People's Computer Company. To the people associated with these movements, the term "computer revolution" was not a figure of speech. Their foe was epitomized by IBM, the maker of IMpersonal computers. For computer visionaries in the '70s, "power to the people" meant not having to submit a batch of cards to a flunky in a white lab coat. Today, that power is here, and taken for granted. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then the right to bear arms is less important than the right to own a computer.
So, how could I throw out that silly yellow box? Maybe (I reasoned) it might even be worth something in the future. After all, people pay big money for old comics, old stamps, old trading cards. Why not historic software boxes? Very carefully, I put all the boxes back on the shelf and resolved to see my bank manager again. We really did need a new wing on the house....
Atari DTP
There are quite a few DTP packages available for our machines. Commercial offerings include Newsroom, News Station, Publishing Pro, Page Designer, Typesetter, Daisy-Dot 3, and a British program called Page Marshall. PD programs include Page Editor, Page Layout, Digital Editor, Antic Publisher, The Works, Dot-Magic, Daisy-Dot 2, and Hi-Resolution Dump. No doubt there are more.
The exact definition of DTP is fairly hazy, and many of the programs above are not equal in terms of capability, ease of use, and quality of output. The key element is the ability to print a full page of combined text and graphics. All other features, however useful (such as multiple fonts, image libraries, text and graphics editors), are highly desirable but not essential. According to this definition, word processors which can accomodate graphics, like PaperClip, or the Word Magic/Graphic Magic combo, can lay claim to DTP capability. However, we would probably draw the line at art programs which have the ability to use text.
If you only need to produce a flyer, or a single page, then any of the programs noted above would suffice. Which one you use will be a matter of personal preference or need. However, if you want to produce something longer, your choice is immediately narrowed down by three factors:
a) Ease of text entry. The longer your document, the more typing you'll have to do. You want this to be as painless as possible. b) Legibility of text. In a one-page flyer your overriding concern is generally an eye-catching design. You can afford to use fonts more for effect than readability since not much text is involved. In longer documents, however, readability is crucial. c) Multicolumn printing. In longer documents, text is easier to read when it's in two or three columns.
For the last several years, I've produced a family newsletter each Christmas. My requirements were quite simple: two columns, the occasional picture, and a title or banner at the top of the first page. I decided to try out different DTP packages. Let me share the results with you.
Newsroom
This program is capable of true DTP by any definition. Its strongest feature is its graphics capability. Not only does it have a large library of top-notch images (called clipart), but it can also position them just about anywhere on the page. The program has a lovely-looking Macintoshstyle interface, though the actual layout procedure is a bit tedious. That's the good news.
The bad news is that the text editor is an absolute dog. Believe me, you'd rather be staked out over an anthill than use it for more than a few paragraphs. Here's but one example: to delete a character you are told to "move the cursor onto that character and press the [Delete] key." Only it doesn't work. You must press [Shift] + [Delete] because, as a technical support person rather sanctimoniously informed me, "[Delete] on the Atari is an upper case function." A close look at your keyboard will tell you this is correct, but can you think of any other program which actually uses it this way?
The printed output is even worse. Newsroom has only two fonts suitable for the body of a newsletter, and both are just too cramped for happy reading. After several pages of this, your eyes will feel like squeezed lemons. In particular, the leading (the space between lines) is too narrow. For this reason the liberal use of images in a Newsroom-generated product is not an option, it's an absolute necessity. Take a good look at the impressivelooking examples provided in the manual, and you'll realize that a great deal of care has been exercised in providing lots of pictures, and lots of white space, to relieve the claustrophic appearance of the text.
It gets worse. My print-outs inserted a single, unwanted line feed beneath each plate. (Newsroom divides each page into 8 areas of equal size, called plates.) Nothing I could do resolved the problem. Finally I had to rewrite my text so that the bottom of each plate coincided with the end of a paragraph. This way the extra linefeed was disguised as a space between paragraphs. Of course, this solution was made especially painful by the wretched text editor.
My wife has used Newsroom on the Apple II, and encountered the same problem. However, she eventually found a solution (though she couldn't remember what it was.) I ended up writing to Springboard, the publishers of Newsroom, to ask for help. The response (which, by the way, came from Spinnaker, following a merger of the two companies), said simply that Newsroom didn't support the interface I was using, the MPP-1150. Not too helpful, since neither their letter nor the manual mentioned which interfaces the program did support. I was sure, however, that the problem would cease when my trusty P:R: Connection (which had blown up during a thunderstorm) was replaced. I was wrong.
News Station
Next I tried News Station, and eventually it became my program of choice. Composing text is a dream because you can use your own word processor. The only drawback is that the copy must be chopped up and saved in platesized chunks of 20 lines each. It's a nuisance, but if you have a word processor like PaperClip, which allows you to mark a spot in the text and delete everything before or after it, the task is fairly painless. News Station doesn't have a library of pictures created especially for it, but it can use Print Shop icons and any standard 62-sector GRAPHICS 8 picture. It can also use any number of standard 9-sector fonts.
News Station is not without flaws. Unlike Newsroom, there is no provision for making banners. This means the left side and the right side of my newsletter's title had to be created separately. I did this by using an art program (Blazing Paddles, which has a nice selection of fonts), and by keeping track of the X and Y coordinates to make sure the text on both sides would line up properly.
This problem is rectified by News Station Companion, which permits the creation of a single plate suitable for use as a banner. It can also break a long text file into plate-sized chunks, and perform a couple of other useful functions. The publisher of these programs, Reeve Software, also produced an advanced version of News Station called Publishing Pro. However, this program is reported to be less versatile and more tricky to use than its predecessor. There was an excellent review of all three programs in the December 1987 issue of ANTIC.
Fun Stuff
The road to DTP started out with a program to produce greeting cards. This imaginative coupling of computer and printer got people thinking about other ways to produce creative hardcopy. One of my favorites is a commercial program called AwardWare. It prints out a lively assortment of certificates, awards, licences, coupons, tickets, ribbons and other similar items. Though I don't use it often, it's a handy program to have when you've got children in the primary grades. It comes with approximately 100 designs or templates, plus an assortment of fonts, borders, and graphics.
Another innovative program is Dennis Griff'in's Paper Planes. This PD disk contains designs for seven paper airplanes, as well as an art program (called variously Polypaint or Digidraft) for creating new ones. Paper Planes is in the same league as Print Shop when it comes to user-friendliness. Just select the design you want and make a single keypress to print it out. On-line folding instructions are clear and easy. What a neat program!
So neat, in fact, it spawned an offshoot by Joan Ryan called Mask Maker, which prints out three different kinds of children's masks: full, half, and sculptured. The enhanced density disk contains 22 masks (an example is shown below), plus instructions and utilities for creating your own. I've printed out several for my youngest daughter, and have begun receiving requests from her friends in kindergarten. Mask Maker is PD and is powered by the same code found in Paper Planes.
Next issue, more joy... . See you then!
