chuq@plaid.UUCP (11/13/87)
I've had my upgrade to Ready, Set, Go! for a couple of days now, gone through the manuals, and started working with it to get a feel for how the program works. This is an initial, off the cuff review, not something in-depth or definitive. I'll probably have more to say as I get further and further into things. The general opinion: They've done a very good job upgrading and enhancing the program. It'll give PageMaker 2.0 a good run for the money, and for longer or repetitive works, I think it blows it away. it isn't perfect (what program is?) but it does the job quite nicely. New features: o reworked user interface. The tool bar is remodeled, some things have been moved to menu items, the display is improved, and there is more screen space dedicated to the document and less to the tools and the program. o new manuals. Letraset threw out the old 'manual' that manhattan graphics wrote, and wrote two new ones. One is a users guide & reference manual, the other is an introduction to design concepts (a NICE touch, and very well done. Finally someone takes some time to tell you what to do with these tools, rather than just how to use them....). o style sheets. glossaries for boilerplate. new character types (extend, condense, and strikeout). TIFF support. EPSF support. Improved fill and pen patterns including gray scales. Real white on black support. Improved spellchecking. Significantly enhanced hyphenation. Significantly improved type handling. Significantly improved justification algorithms. arbitrary runaround. Reads (somewhat slowly) word 3.0 files with formatting. they fixed scrolling to work right. This is off the top of my head. I'm skipping lots of neat new stuff. The program sings, it dances, it might toast bread. One of the first things I did when I brought up the program was start mocking up some pages for OtherRealms. Just for kicks, I tossed in gutter lines, a four column format, a 10 pica column using 10/11 Palatino with full justification and 50% word spacing, full hyphenation and printed it out. Headers were white on black. (one side note about hyphenation. You can now tell it to not break the last word on a sentence, not break Alphabetized words, give it minimum and maximum breaks and minimum size of a broken word. This makes the hyphenation truly use- ful. Because you no longer see stuff the like above paragraph. Working with the program cold, I did the above layout in less time than it took me in RSG3 to do the old, standard format. When you put everything into style sheets, you can change a type spec in one place and have it modify the entire document. The result, by the way, was astounding. While I'm unlikely to use four column because it requires more graphic breakup that I'm able/willing to do right now, it came out beautiful. The ablility to squeeze interword spacing, and the improved justification and hyphenation made 10 point in a 10 Pica column work without gaping holes or other problems. This was no possible in RSG 3. (The above was sort of a worst case test of laying out text on a page, just to see how it worked). Printing seems a little slower than RSG3, but the complexity of the page, and especially of the justification, more than explains it. The program isn't perfect. As improved as the manual is, it still needs a LOT more work. The index is poorly done. The reference section doesn't include examples of the dialog boxes, which makes understanding the descriptions of the fields of the dialog boxes tough (suggestion: have the program running while paging through things). There are some places where the user interface is rough and non-intuitive, especially around style sheets. Style sheets are specific to a document -- you can't create a system wide style sheet. You can import one from another document, but that makes updating a series of documents and keeping a moving standard consistent difficult. Executing style sheets is awkward to some degree, too, and if you don't set up your style sheet very carefully, it'll eat all of your formatting information. How to preserve formatting information isn't well documented. Overall, this is a good program. At least as good as PageMaker 2.0, and definitely a blowout for documents of any size, or documents with repetitive styles and lots of text. It's got every features I could ever imagine wanting, although I'm sure we'll think up things for the next generation. I'm VERY happy with RSG4. I haven't broken it, I haven't crashed it, I haven't found any problems. The worst I can say is that the user interface is occasionally non-intuitive, although they've significantly improved it over RSG3. The documentation is better, although I think it can be improved further -- and I hope someone takes the hint and writes a Desktop Publishing with RSG4 book (anyone know a good publisher that would want one????). RSG 4 is a winner. chuq --- Chuq "Fixed in 4.0" Von Rospach chuq@sun.COM Delphi: CHUQ
tow@parcvax.xerox.com (Robert Francis Tow) (11/16/87)
>I've had my upgrade to Ready, Set, Go! for a couple of days now, gone >through the manuals, and started working with it to get a feel for how the >program works. This is an initial, off the cuff review, not something >in-depth or definitive. I'll probably have more to say as I get further and >further into things. >The general opinion: They've done a very good job upgrading and enhancing > the program. It'll give PageMaker 2.0 a good run for the money, and > for longer or repetitive works, I think it blows it away. it isn't > perfect (what program is?) but it does the job quite nicely. > ReadySetGo 4.0 is a vast improvement. I have been using it, in combination with Illustrator, Canvas, LaserWriters, a Linotype model 100, and a Dest scanner for about a month, and I have had a few problems, however. On a 1meg SE with the new finder/multifinder/system stuff from Apple (as developers, we've had that for about a month, too) RSG 4.0 will crash the system when trying to print a one page document composed of simple type all of one size, using three New Baskerville faces (Roman, Bold, Italic). The same document will print from an SE equipped with more ram. This was running Finder, not multifinder. Of course, this may be due to the new system software, not RSG per se. If one enables fractional character widths, and then attempts a tab with a leading character, the calculation of the number of such character and their extent is screwed up - it makes an excursion to the right beyond the proper boundry. So one cannot tightly kern a body of text with such tabbing. On the subject of kerning, it is irritating that even in a program that now supports fractional character widths, kerning is still restricted to increments of a screen pixel! (Other missing features: support for indexing, ability to tie the position of a graphic *relative* to a text position (try editing a dictionary with embedded pictures to see what I mean - add an entry in 'a' and then see how you have to touch every follwong entry!), non-integer point sizes). I tried importing 635dpi and 1270 dpi bitmaps from Canvas version 1.02 and printing them. This worked to a LaserWriter, but had problems to a Linotype model 100. The 635dpi bitmap printed, but improperly. The 1270dpi bitmap (the natural resolution of the Linotype) refused to print, after several hours of Linotype time - which is curious as it was the same amount of data as the 635 dpi image, but simply reduced in size. A final plaint: the spelling checker does not account for ligatures. I use "fi" and "fl" ligatures in the faces that support them: the spelling checker gags every time. On a long document this becomes *very* irritating. I like using RSG. In combination with Illustrator, Canvas, a scanner (but I want a true gray scale scanner!), and a Lintotype one may due *almost* everything one would desire. I am looking forward to the acquisition addition of ImageStudio and a gray scale scanner. Rob Tow ParcPlace Systems Internet: rob@ParcPlace.com ---------------------------------------- Submissions to: desktop%plaid@sun.com -OR- sun!plaid!desktop Administrivia to: desktop-request%plaid@sun.com -OR- sun!plaid!desktop-request Paths: {ihnp4,decwrl,hplabs,seismo,ucbvax}!sun --- Chuq "Fixed in 4.0" Von Rospach chuq@sun.COM Delphi: CHUQ