albert@mthvax.cs.miami.edu (07/06/90)
At work we are looking into a high-end Desktop Publishing System. The system does not necessarily have to be UNIX but for obvious reasons I would prefer it to be thus. We have next week a demo on a SUN SPARCstation 1 featuring FrameMaker and Interleaf Publisher. I would like to know if this is the high-end of the DTP market on UNIX machines, if not on the SUN. Also, for those of you who have experience on either FrameMaker or Interleaf Publisher, please provide me with your comments on their performance. And for those of you who have experience on better machines featuring better software, please provide me with your comments on their performance. Thanks, albert chin ... mthvax!mamia!albert
pm@cs.city.ac.uk (Pete Mellor) (07/21/90)
Phil Fernandez (v9n261) and Albert Chin (v9n254) both ask for advice on DTP packages, in particular Interleaf and Framemaker. I am sending this to Sun-spots, rather than direct to both the original enquirers, since I had difficulty getting Albert's mail address to work. Early on, a widely-dispersed project in which I am involved decided to standardize on a single DTP system, so that all sites could produce reports to a common format and e-mail them to one another. Framemaker and Interleaf were examined. I did not see the Framemaker demo, but I did see Interleaf, and it was impressive. One of the attractions was that it was available on Mac as well as Sun, and several sites (including ours) had that mix of machines. The drawbacks of Interleaf were cost and size. The package filled up a very substantial chunk of my 150Mbyte disk during the demo. In fact, we had to compress all my user files to get it on, and the installation took one of Interleaf's own experts the best part of a day. Unfortunately, it did not live up to expectations. Particularly, we have had problems moving files between Sun and Mac, and sending files by e-mail (the initial attempts resulted in corruption of files). Other specific problems were the time taken to change fonts on the Mac, the difficulty of learning and using Interleaf (Mac users infinitely preferred the Mac tools, some using, e.g., Micro-Soft Word in conjunction with Micro-soft Paint), and the persistent non-appearance of an X-windows version of Interleaf, which meant that sites using X had to close it down to use Interleaf. This last problem was aggravated by a bug between X and Interleaf which meant that Interleaf hung if X was not closed down cleanly. The result? Well, some of us are using TeX or LaTeX, some are using nroff or troff, some are using... :-( Interleaf now seems to have been abandoned by nearly all the members of the project, after heaven knows what expenditure on licences. There has also been some stuff on Sun-spots very recently, to do with the size of the Postscript files generated by Interleaf, which has caused lpr to run out of store or take 20 minutes to print a modest document. Have a look at v9n209, v9n210, v9n214, and v9n219. Peter Mellor, Centre for Software Reliability, City University, Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB Tel.: +44 (0)71-253-4399 Ext. 4162/3/1 Fax.: +44 (0)71-253-3861 E-mail: p.mellor@uk.ac.city (JANET)