cheung@vu-vlsi.Villanova.EDU (Wilson Cheung) (02/17/89)
I just got Pagestream delivered by UPS. At first glance it looks very impressive with a very thick binder. Once you open it you'll find only about 100-150 pages, about 1/3 of the thickness of the binder. That's not to say that there is no meat to this desktop publisher. In terms of features it surpasses Professional Page. Some neat features are the ability to rotate characters and the inclusion of fill patterns in stuctured drawings. I also liked its user interface in setting up the line and character spacing; a requestor pops up and you can either manually enter line and character spacing values or click on a "text gadget" and visually stretch or shrink the spacing to taste. It is also much faster and precise than Professional Page. Prof. Page tends to get very annoying when trying to edit complex text or structured graphic sequences. If you try deleting a couple of sentences you'll start swearing at the computer as Prof. Page redraws the text at a very slow pace. If you try to draw a complicated structured drawing you can never be sure, without going to full zoom, if too apparently connected lines are really connected. And if you want to start editing some drawings you'll probably have enough time to fix yourself some coffee as Prof. Page starts refreshing the entire display. In contrast when I tried editing a block of text the response was immediate. If you start inserting text, PageStream has no problem keeping up (I type at 40 wpm). The PagesStream window kind of resembles the Aegis Draw Plus windows. It has the ability to show grids and rulers as well as a grid snap feature. This makes a very well defined environment for making structured drawings on the current page, without having to worry if lines are meeting crisply. Much like Aegis Draw, you can overlay text on drawings, rotate, duplicate and size the drawings. If you create any close polygonal shapes you can fill them with a number of patterns. If you want to perform free drawings PageStream is a responsive as Deluxe Paint. Now, the down side of PageStream. For the most part it seems to be a bit unfinished. In its current form, I probably wouldn't recommend its usage for any long documents. It simply crashes too often. I couldn't even get past the second tutorial without seeing the guru. In another instance I tried loading in a printer driver, crash. Another time I tried printing out a page, crash. Another thing, it doesn't seem to have all the printer drivers the manual claims it has. I was looking for a Gemini-10x and the closest thing I could find was a printer called "dot matrix printer" The only logical assumption is that this probably selects the current preference driver. In any case, the output quality I got was worse than a screen dump from notepad. I suspect if they had a Gemini-10x selection, as the manual states it should have, the quality would be closer to what they advertise. Wilson Cheung
schwager@m.cs.uiuc.edu (02/19/89)
Speaking of PageStream, I got a card in the mail many months ago that
said that we the faithful would be getting extra fonts as a reward for
our patience. I received two disks in my PageStream binder, and no
mention of additional fonts. What I did receive was an order form
telling me that I'll get 50% off my first font order. This is nice, but
I think I'd rather have the extra fonts. Can another PageStream owner
enlighten me, perhaps?
So far I'm impressed with its speed and features. It seems at least as
fast, maybe faster, than PageSetter (_not_ Pro. Page). It is bug-laden
though, and some things don't work as advertised. You'd think that
after being almost a year late they'd have gotten some of the more
obvious bugs worked out (ie, a "Free Twice" guru error on quitting).
-Mike Schwager schwager@a.cs.uiuc.edu
-- {uunet,convex,pur-ee}!uiucdcs!schwager schwager%uiuc@csnet-relay.arpa
University of Illinois, Dept. of Computer Science