| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ PAO/PRESSE ★ STOP PRESS DESKTOP PUBLISHING ★ |
| STOP PRESS (Amstar&CPC) | STOP PRESS (Amstrad Action) | STOP PRESS DESKTOP PUBLISHING (Computer Partner) | STOP PRESS DESKTOP PUBLISHING (CPC Amstrad International) |
Even alter nine months out of the limelight. Stop Press (formerly Pagemaker) has. up until now. been the only serious desktop publishing package for the CPC It's been the closest Amstrad users could get to emulating the hi-tech Fleet Street setups Although speed and several high-brow features are lacking, with a little work and patience, the results can be staggering. Stop Press allows you to create and print A4-sized documents Text and graphics can be mixed anywhere on a large, scrolling screen by using either mouse, keyboard or joystick - basically it's a typesetting and artwork system. The main design-screen displays seven icons Each selects an alternate operation or mode. Moving from left to right: From the Filing icon you may load and save pages, screens and cutouts The drawing area or page is roughly A4 in size. The canvas area (any part that can be viewed on the computer screen) acts as a window on the page You may scroll up. down, left or right while working A complete page takes a phenomenal 68k of disk space Screens can be thought ol as the canvas area, and cutouts are areas of the canvas. A cutout may vary from a Jew pixels to the whole canvas area. Surgeon's delight The next icon. Paste, allows you to manipulate images on the canvas. The simplest operation being copy; where a design from one part of the screen is duplicated elsewhere It is possible to copy images with ghosting. This simply lets you select which colour (black or white) is placed on the canvas. Moving is similar to copying, however, instead of duplicating an image it lilts it from one area and plaoes it in another.
Areas may be flipped in either horizontal or vertical planes. Other effects - lor example rotating through 90 arcs, variable stretching and ofl-setting or scrolling small areas of the screen - are also possible. The Text mode is the most important section Text can be placed anywhere in a variety of fonts, sizes and formats to give sparkle to otherwise standard designs and screens. A window must be defined before entering characters. All text gets formatted inside this window Font facts If you've looked at a variety of magazines, books and newspapers you will notice that text can be arranged in may patterns or formats. Stop Press allows you to emulate many of these styles:
Possibly the most powerful feature to be found in Text mode is aut-ollow This allows text to fill an area ol virtually any shape. Circles, triangles - anything, in fact. Incredible layouts can be made Before text hits the screen you may 'effect' it. This merely alters the manner in which the font is output to the screen normal, bold, itahc. There are 17 fonts supplied on the Stop Press disk. Plenty, but you can easily define new sets and existing ones may be enlarged or reduced in any direction. Type-setter print quality Many of the components within the Graphics mode are standard art-package functions, but nonetheless are very welcome Areas may be tilled with patterns - and there's a healthy selection of them Different spray-types exist brush, mist, ghosting. Even a shape generator is present.
Having the finished page on screen is all very well, but the real purpose behind Stop Press is to be abie to print oamera-ieady A4 pages Although printing a page can take over two hours, especially in NTQ mcde (near-typesetter quality), the results are spectacular Ol course, if all you want is a small window then just that can be dumped The goodies icon provides a host of useful features from entering system calls (bar commands) to scanning images. To scan or digitize matter you must have a video digitizer. Images can be scanned straight on to the page and altered later. The Vidi Digitizer can be purchased from Rombo in Livingston (0506 xxxxxx) or direct from AMS Price is £89.95 With Stop Press you have the potential to create startlingly good newsletters, press releases, even small magazines. It is the package to use if you wish to enter the exciting world of DTP on the CPC.
AA
|
|  |
