info-mac@uw-beaver (02/05/85)
From: Jim Nisbet <niz@Lindy> I just saw a demo of MacPublisher, a program designed to do electronic newsletter composition. It does let you layout 1, 2 or 3 column pages and use "scissors" to cut up the individual articles. It replaces cut-and-paste with the electronic equivalent. It's strengths are that it is very visual, and it allows EASY combinations of pictures and text. Also, it seemed that it wasen't buggy (after an hour and a half of playing with it). The biggest weakness for me was the inability to mix different fonts in the same article. You can't even italicize a word without making the word a separate article! Or at least I couldn't figure out how to do it. The other weakness was the lack of a function similar to the finder's ICON "clean up" capability. I couldn't figure out how to get it to automatically break a long article into multiple columns. Instead, I have to do it "manually" with the scissors. MacPublisher is written by Boston Software Publishers (617-327-5775) and cost $99. It has very recently been released--I couldn't find it at our local computer store. Has anyone used it for making newsletters? Any reactions?? Also, are there similar products? At the Apple Shareholder's meeting they used a program called "PageMaker" (???) -- has anyone seen/used/heard-rumors about that software? /j
info-mac@uw-beaver (02/13/85)
From: Edward.Tecot@CMU-CS-H Boston (mumble) sent me a complementary demo a few weeks ago. I have played with it and CMUMUG will be using it for its newsletter. I have found that it works quite well (it is a bit slow). My major complaint is that articles must all be of the same type style. I can see limiting it to the same font and size, but not the same style (bold/italic/etc.). In any case, you can crop images by using the Camera (a really cool desk accessory). As for the demo pages all having something on them; mine didn't, even though the package and disk had DEMO stamped on it. Anyone know what is up? _emt