| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ PAO/PRESSE ★ FLEET STREET EDITOR ★ |
Fleet Street Editor (Amstrad Computer User) | Fleet Street Editor (Amstrad Action) | Fleet Street Editor (Amstrad Acción) |
PAPER TIGER Has Mirrorsoft's Fleet Street Editor been worth the wait? Why does its arrival mean the AA finally gets tidied up? Pat McDonald answers these and many other questions. Welcome to the only piece of software ever to be left behind by history. Thanks to The Computer, virtually no newspapers are produced in Fleet Street any more. Mirrorsoft have been converting FSE lor quite some considerable time now - it was mentioned us imminent as long ago as AA4! It's long been an AA office ;oke: the stock reply to avoid unpleasant jobs was, I'll get round to it when Fleet Street is published". Looks like a lot of odd jobs will get done now... First Impression The package is cncased in an attractive bright red binder. Inside there's a looseleaf manual and two disks. Maybe it's a big program? What's it do? Fleet Street belongs to that branch of software known as desktop publishing packages. These are used to lay out documents, both text and pictures, into a professional looking finished page 01 pages suitable for publication. Such software ranges in scale from that which would have difficulty in laying out a club newsletter to the industrial level which uses them to print real books and magazines (such as AA - produced on good old 6128's and Apple Macintoshes). On this sort of scale, it's fairly obvious which end the CPC by itself is closer to - but don't be too quick to judge (see the article in this issue to see how well CPC's do.)
Get down to it The manual is loose leaf, and starts out well with a hands on demonstration using a partly finished document. This is easy enough to do, and teaches the elementary controls very quickly -as well as offering a friendly welcome to the program. It's a shame that the manual doesn't help as much from then on. Ratherthan giving similar tutorials on further features of Fleet Street Editor, you are left with a long descriptions of lists of features and not much else. A pity really, because what's there is well written and presented. I've dealt with the manual, but what of the two disks? Roth sides of each of them is used: one contains the main program, the other contains lots of graphic libraries to use in your own document. There are plenty of these, although they are mostly small logos rather than digitized action. Good stuff The program has three distinct sections, arrived at via a front end screen showing three icons. The cursor keys or spacc bar moves the marker from one to the other, and return selects it. The first part of the package is the graphics section, used to organize the artistic element of a document. It accomplishes this through simple two tone pictures. As every Amstrad owner knows, Mode 2 is the black and white high resolution mode, yes? So the program should use mode 2, yes? Well, no. actually. Instead images are read into the machine using medium resolution mode 1. The reasoning, apparently, stems from the fact that the pixels are square, rather than rcctan gular, in this mode. Artwork and drawings are thus easier to get into proportion. The cursor/pointer used in the art package is a nifty little item, featuring the usual cross hairs and a flashing dot in the middle. If the dot doesn't flash, it means the machine is busy doing something. The spacebar is used to confirm decisions (why?), rather than the return used in other parts of the package. The above is used to control the WIMP enviroment which stands for (all together now!) Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointer/Pull down menus, depending on where you heard it. Running across the top of the screen is the usual row of icons. By the left (wait for it!)... Brush size adjustment, paint, pencil, boxes, eraser, undo, scissors, text, zoom, circle, fill, rotate, mirror, invert inks, disk access, library, re-size and exit. Also on the screen are the screen co-ordinates For an exciting, dynamic explanation of what they're used for, read on. Freehand Doodling on the screen is easy - and fun. The regular drawing functions are there: line drawing, circles and boxes created with 'elastic lines', so exact positioning is not difficult, though most of the time you probably won't be so finicky. Other aids to getting your artwork just right are the screen co-ordinates, which can be remembered when drawing point-to-point. Drawing the edges of shapes, then, is more or less trouble free. Filling these shapes with patterns - to give the effect of shades of light and dark - is also no problem. The fill command gives a list to choose from, and you can define your own pattern. The brush command is similar, but the pattern only goes where you put it, as opposed to fill splattering 'ink' all over your design. The brush size is adjustable in both width and height. Regrettably, a spray can function has not been included. The graphics libraries stored on the second disk can be accessed from the art program simply. They can be loaded into a spare screen, and the artwork you desire can be moved into the main editing area with the minimum of fuss. Text is fairly easy to add onto a piece, although there are drawbacks with this function: characters can be printed in any direction, but no extra fonts can be added, and text always remains in the same size. And because shift is used to swap between icons, capitals must be selected usmg Caps Lock not the easiest thing to remember. The Copydesk should settle most of these deficiencies. A copy of the screen before the last operation was completed is always held in memory, so experimentation is not fraught with danger. The icon, strangely enough, is a face. Job done Finishing off artwork can be laborious, and the editing operations that help with this are good. Mistakes are erased with the paint brush option using a blank pattern. Large rectangular areas of the screen can also be cleared, and wiping the whole screen has to be confirmed by pressing y. Moving areas of the screen about - cut/paste operations to the technical - is efficient, if somewhat slow. Similarly, mirroring and rotation can be done on small parts of the screen. Zooming in for some fine detail is just as convenient to have, although return has to be pressed to finish it. not space. There is a re-size function to enlarge or compress an area, and distortion of the image is minimal. Finally, artwork can be saved out as a cut, or box, saved to disk in a compressed form - a full screen might use as little as 8 or 9K. These cuts can be included on a page. Copydesk This part of Fleet Street deals with actually producing a page, using some fairly traditional methods. Sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin.
Until a few years ago, printing masters were set up by typesetters, who used to insert characters made out of lead into a blank page board. This would be set up manually to have the correct layout, with the margins set up, and so on. It was a time consuming and extremely skilled task. In a superficially similar way, Fleet Street lays out the text, across a grid-like pattern that conforms to the page layout. The grid is alterable, so thai you can place pictures on the page, and have text flow around them. This is a very fundamental feature -the program remembers the text and pictures independently of the screen memory. If the layout is changed, the page is redrawn from this backup buffer to conform with the new pattern When you've loaded (and turned over the disk) you can select the margins. A wide margin looks better, but gives you less space to work on. After that, you select, the number of columns the page you are reading has two. The screen setup is similar to the art program, in that there is an options line across the top of the screen. This contains the words (no icons): File, Layout, Art. Justify. Edit and Font. Incredibly slowwww Edit is probably the most used. It. contains the option insert, for getting at the text. You must first select which column you wish to edit - they are all independent of each other. That way, a mistake on one doesn't generally mess up the others as well. There are also some cut and paste options, which work very well for editing text. You can ever, examine the cut and paste buffer, to check that you're moving the right thing. Oh, and you can get a preview of youi work - although this takes minutes, and involves saving the page to disk. Inserting text is probably the most time consuming part of using the program. The scrolling up and down of the page is so incredibly sloiyvr You can almost see the program thinking, 'Hmm... Shall T scroll a bit more?' The program supports a fair range of fonts, all selectable from one of the pull-down-menus. They include both serif (with tails) and sans (without). The full list is West End. Ritz, Italic. Cube (science fiction), Full, Engraved, Olde and Stencil. - the names are loosely descriptive of the fonts'various appearances. A bold option is included, as well as 16 point and 24 point size characters for headlines and suaplmes. Unfortunately you cannot load or design any alternative fonts -your'e stuck with the above. It may seem a lot. but only four fonts for headlines? Methinks two pages produced with this by two different people will look almost identical Justification of the document is configurable, in that you can choosc between left justified (ragged edged), centre (so every thing is central) and full out, which makes lines fit across the screen as much as possible. The trouble is that this function is global, i.e. if you redraw the screen, all the text appears using the one justify option! You can get round it. but it's tncky. Inserting text, is all very well, but the pages are generally formatted around the pictures. These are loaded from within the File menu, and put onto the screen using the Art menu. Positioning is accurate down to the character scale which is always onscreen, so getting it right isn't difficult. Problem: at present, loading graphics corrupts them! What you get is the original picture, with extra lines cutting it at random. Not good. There arc also two art commands, line and box, which can be used to surround text to good effect. The hassle (and positioning graphics is just as bad) is you can only place artwork on what is onscreen - which means scrolling down to the relevant part of a page. Once you have some artwork, you'll probably have to tidy up where the text goes, so that the two don't overlap. Fieet Street is good at this. You can choose to do a whole change, which changes all of the text column widths at once: a single linechange, good for irregular columns (wrapping around graphics): and above or below the cursor line, so you can setup boxes of text quite easily. In a similar vein, you can adjust the 'leading', an archaic term which refers to the spacing between the lines of text - the 'baselines'(we've increased the leading in this paragraph lo illustrate what we mean.) Spreading your text vertically in this way makes it much easier to read.
If a column overloads with the text, the excess can be placed in an overflow buffer. This is similar to the cuts buffer, but it can be retained if the screen is cleared. So you can put more text onto a second page i: you run out of space, although you must finish with the first page first: you can only edit one at a time. The limit One of the problems with Fleet. St is to do with the way it remembers everything that goes onto a page. Inclusion ot lots of graphics is not possible, because the memory fills up relatively quickly. Two 9K pictures won't fit at the same time. You can't just load one, put it up, delete it and load the next either it's wiped from the page as well as memory when you delete it. The printing options are fair. Both draft and quality prints are supported: pui simply this means that Lhe print head prints either once or twice. All in all, I can't say I'm terribly impressed with the copydesk part of Fleet St. The problems aren't just the bugs, which are fairly awful in themselves, no. it's the slow speed of scrolling, and the lack of memory for graphics. I did say that there were three parts to this, and the Administration is the last module. It is used for mundane tasks like setting the default drives, changing the screen colours etc, and also for converting four colour mode 1 screens into two colour mode 1 screens. It makes no attempt to interpret the image, so you're generally left with a negative image that's unusable. Finished? In conclusion it must be said that, even for a pre-production copy, this program is useless for desktop publishing. The only purpose for which people would buy it is as a challenge: make up a page despite the bugs and user unfriendliness.
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