macdonald@mtwain.dec.com (Paul MacDonald - CUP/ML - 223-3439) (02/18/89)
I received my copy of PageStream V1.5 yesterday. This is the first Amiga release of the product. Initial impressions are very mixed. First, the program is darn fast. They claim it is written in 100% assembly language code - to the tune of 64,000 lines. It is much faster than Pagesetter, ProWrite, and Professional Page. It has a number of feature lacking in those other programs including superb dot matrix output. I thought I was looking at laser output when that first page came off my LQ-850. Finally, a product that supports high-res 24-pin printers. However, I don't see the product replacing Professional Page for my monthly newsletter. Here are some obvious "first night" reasons: o The biggest bug of them all - everytime PageStream is run, even without opening a file, it loses 10K of Chip memory and 1K of Fast memory. This can only be recovered by rebooting. Load a 3 page document, edit it, save it, and exit PageStream and you lose even more Chip memory. I had only 297K left in Chip memory out of my normal 431K after doing a simple 3 page document with graphics. I had to reboot to recover it. Gawd! I thought those types of memory management oversights disappeared with Amiga developers years ago. o I have had several Gurus. Most notably with the spelling checker when saving a new word to the dictionary. I have also Guru'd when inporting a graphic into the Picture screen. o The screen setup doesn not save properly. Most notably the ruler never reappears after it's been saved. Also, once the default screen has been altered, two unexplained lines appear on the x and y axes of the ruler. o The scroll bar indicates that the top of a page is being displayed when actually it's the bottom that is displayed. This always happens when moving from page 1 to page 2. o They did not include any PostScript fonts. Hard to believe. I am SURE I will find numerous more bugs. I don't recall PageSetter or Professional Page ever being this buggy. It's a real shame since Soft-Logik had planned to ship this nearly a year ago! Guess their beta testing was flawed! The memory problem though is the most outstanding bug. -Paul (after two hours with PageStream)