| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ PAO/PRESSE ★ AMX PAGEMAKER ★ |
Here, at last, is the legendary Pagemaker. Has the long-drawn-out wait been worthwhile? Are the features up to scratch? Is it worth the money? Read on and judge for yourself. With Pagemaker you can design your own magazine on your computer screen - an A4 page containing both text and graphics freely intermixed. Essentially, it is a high-resolution typesetting and artwork system. You will drool when you hear what AMS's Pagemaker can do. The system can be used with either the AMX mouse or a combination of joystick and keyboard controls. Graphics masterpieces you created earlier on other software can be 'imported'to Pagemaker. Text files from many well-known wordprocessors such as Tasword, Protext or WordStar can be loaded in. You can print text in a number of different typestyles, making flow around graphics. If you don't find that impressive, then having the ability to convert video images (such as those produced by the Vidi video digitizer reviewed two issues ago) into a form that AMX Pagemaker can understand, certainly is.
When you first load Pagemaker, you are presented with a screen displaying several icons symbols representing options available - and a section cordoned off for your design. Select any of these icons and a small menu will pop up, letting you get at any of the drawing or text-handling routines. The top left of the screen displays seven icons and the top right shows two. A page will take up a staggering 68k of disk storage; screens take up the normal 17k. The screen is in Mode 2, making the most of high-resolution graphics. Up to 16 different shades of grey can be displayed, giving some excellent detailed and interesting pictures. Mode 0 and Mode 1 screens can be loaded into the page different colours will have different grey-levels associated to them. The next icon in the form of a pair of scissors, lets you cut, paste, rotate, stretch and scroll any area of the page. A rectangular area (which you can define) can be easily duplicated elsewhere with the Copy function. The usual mirror images - left-to-right and top-to-bottom - can be done; so can rotations of 90, 180 and 270 degrees. Using the Rotate option will often corrupt highly detailed images. This is because Mode 2 screens have asymmetrical resolution - the pixels are taller than they are wide. Sometimes you can take advantage of this to get amazing effects. Stretching or squashing a picture can produce excellent results. This must be one of the most powerful functions on any art package. Choosing the Stretch option gives you the further choice of reducing the image by half or magnifying it to double-size. The third option, variable stretch, will let a rectangular area of the screen be squeezed or expanded into another rectangular area with different proportions. Another very useful facility is Scroll. An area of the canvas can be scrolled or moved in any direction to pixel accuracy. It's great if you like distorting someone's face, for instance The heart of the Pagemaker system is the text mode, selected by an icon displaying a script letter A. Text can be placed on the screen in a multitude of sizes, fonts and formats. Font sizes can be varied from a few square pixels to 128 by 64! Fonts can be redesigned with the in-built character definer. Text can be printed using proportional spacing, left and right justification, centering or word-wrap. Many other features are included and are easily selected. Many of these tricks centring for example - work to pixel accuracy, not just to the nearest character. With the Format option you design your basic text appearance - column width, straight or ragged margins, etc. Centring text is the first of many text-handling functions: words are centred between the cursor position and the right margin. Text wj1 be centred inside the page - not the canvas area. If a text window has been defined then everything will be centred in that If you wish all lines to be the same length in a column, use the justify option. This prevents words sticking out on the right side of the column; it works by inserting enough extra space between words to pad out each line to the correct length. 'Ragged left' or tight justified'text is also possible, ideal for lists or directories. Selecting Word Wrap ensures that text is not split at the right margin. Instead, the whole word is carried over to the next line. Justified text is not possible when this option is in use. If what-you-type-is-what-you-get is what you want, choose Lateral, which will not format text at all Column and Autoflow are two independent Format options that control the overall way in which the other Format options are implemented. Column is the default; it means that when the right margin is reached, the text should be formatted - as with standard wordprocessors. Autoflow, on the other hand, is very different. With it you can achieve incredible layouts. It allows text to fill an area of almost any shape. When a picture or other object blocks the path of the text, a new line is created. It has to be seen to be believed. Effects alters the way the font is output to the screen. Words can be italicized or 'thickened* (made bold), which can do wonders when high -lighting parts of your text. There is one further effect that you can subject your text to: Attribute. This basically alters the area around a character by changing it to the opposite colour from the character. The size and spacing of characters within a font can be altered with Adjust. When altering the size of a character, you will see it stretch (or shrink) enabling you to note exactly how it will appear on screen. Letters have different widths; for example, an i is much narrower than an m. When text is output to the canvas, the computer makes sure that the gap between characters is identical - a very professional finish. It is possible to 'kern' or adjust this spacing; even negative spacing is allowed, which can produce interesting results like an expensive advert. For simple layouts like posters or even cartoon strips, manual entry of text is ideal. However, for large chunks of text it is probably best to use a proper wordprocessor. AMX PageMaker can load in text files produced from many of these. If any of the Format options have been pre-selected, they will be obeyed. For example, if Autoflow is on and the cursor is positioned inside the object (or for that matter outside), the loaded text will fill that space. There are four fonts to choose under the Sel Font option: the normal Amstrad typestyle, a flowing typestyle, an outline font and what printers call a 'pi font' - various symbols and signs. It is possible to define any of the fonts (bar the Amstrad one) or characters using the character definer included in the package. Fonts can be designed from scratch using the Font option. Once designed, the font can be saved. Likewise, other fonts can be loaded whenever required - these will no doubt be for sale from AMS and others in due course. The last of the text-handling options is Character. This allows you to 'pick up' from any location on the screen a character or design and invert it (change whatever was white to black and vice-versa) or mirror it top-to-bottom or left-to-right. Hopping onto the next icon, a pot with a paint brush sticking from it, we find a miniature graphics studio. Its facilities equal or exceed those in many stand-alone graphics packages. Paint , the first option, is a very intelligent fill routine. It can fill any shape with your choice of character or pa"err, Tremendous results can be achieved using this -you make a mistake, there is an Unfill option. It all adds to the making of a superb package. The Spray option can create convincing pictures. The brash spray will produce a solid effect; mist spray will give an airbrush-type effect (a series of random dots that eventually build up to make the pattern). All the standard features available in normal art packages are present in Pagemaker. circles, ellipses, arcs, triangles, boxes and lines. You can define their sizes and shapes. The shapes are drawn extremely rapidly - unlike other art packages. Select Font, Font and Character have all been repeated in the graphics studio for convenience. These options work just as well for designing patterns and displaying them as for characters. Defining windows is next, chosen by selecting the icon showing a blank page. A window is a small area of the screen in which all your work will be confined. For example, if you use the Spray option, the spray will appear only inside the window, preventing the rest of your work from being ruined by an accidental slip. It is possible to define either a text window or a graphics window. Only one window may be in use at a time; this is not a limitation as once you have finished with one, you can easily define another. If necessary, you can invert the contents of either type of window. Many packages fall down on their printer-dump routines. Pagemaker scores heavily in this area. Selecting the printer icon will let you choose either an A4 or A5 printout. Further to this, you are given the choice of three dump qualities: Draft, which is 'high speed', takes half an hour for a supposedly low-quality A4 dump. There is also Standard - medium speed and medium quality. Finally there is NTQ, near typesetting quality. Be warned that you will be waiting well over an hour for a NTQ dump. But the results! They are stunning! If I had not witnessed the finished page. 1 would never have believed that such quality was available from such an inexpensive setup, compared to phototype-setters costing as much as a house. The high-quality dump should be used only when your ribbon is fairly worn, to avoid smudging. It caters for most printers Epson-compatibles, Amstrad DMPs. And in the 'near future' it will be possible to drive a laserprinter. You can dump a complete page, just the screen in view or a graphics or text window previously defined. What more could you ask? The last icon on the top left of the screen, a shaded square, could well be dismissed as the most uninteresting of the lot. In fact this is the Goodies icon: it contains a jumble of facilities. Preview, the first, lets you either inspect the page in RAM or any other pages you may have stored on disk. It draws a miniature of the page on screen. Gridlock helps align the cursor accurately. Imagine a grid drawn on the screen - you determine its spacing. When the cursor is moved, it jumps in tidy increments according to the grid. This is extremely handy in technical drawings where straight lines are essential. If you want the cursor co-ordinates displayed, select the Coords option. Calls to the computer's operating system are available by selecting Command. These are better known as 'bar commands'- commands prefixed with the '|' symbol. It is possible to set the speed at which the pointer or cursor travels. Default is slow - but that is hare's pace by comparison to some other art software. The options for medium and fast can prove tricky for detailed drawing. Scanner is the final goody. It lets pictures from a video digitizer be 'grabbed'and placed anywhere within the page. Gust as we went to press, Rombo, maker of the Vidi digitizer reviewed in AA 15, released an overlay file to read its images into Pagemaker. We did not have time to test it.) There are only two icons left on the screen. One looks like a sick mouse: the Quick-Click Window (QCW). The other is a cross. You'll be thankful for it wher. you have made an error and wish to delete your last command. The QCW has many features that otherwise need two or three button presses. Choosing this icon will cause a further 20 to spring to view: gridlock on/off, zoom, ghosting orv'off, spray size/type, pattern select, shape characteristics and instant eraser, to name but a few. With Zoom you can magnify and alter an area of the screen -ideal for fine or detailed work. Ghosting is the process of displaying an image on the screen but using only one of the two colours that make up that image. Shapes can be drawn hollow, solid, patterned and dotted, among other ways. You're not convinced that PageMaker is much use? The potential is there to create startlingly good newsletters, press releases, even small magazines - look our cover page was designed using Pagemaker. What a system! The software is extremely well written with just about every function you could ask for - and others you would never dream of. You may -well wonder how it keeps all this information in memory. The answer is that it doesn't. If you select an option that is not currently in memory, it will load it from disk. Shuffling disks can become a bore, but the end results fully justify the need. Before you rush out and buy AMX Pagemaker, make sure you have 164k of memory: either a 6128. a 664 with an extra bank of 64k memory (the DK'Tronics expansion RAM works fine), or a 464 with an extra 64k and a disk drive. If you have these, then don't hesitate to obtain this extremely useful utility. AA |
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