Apple IIgs Desktop Publishing Part 1
By Mark Smith
Copyright (c) 1994 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
This month Mark Smith starts a series on Apple IIgs Desktop Publishing (DTP). Not many people know how easy DTP can be on an Apple IIgs, what DTP software is available, or what each package can and can't do. Hopefully, Mark will explain all! Read on....
Introduction
The Apple IIgs may not be considered suitable for commercial desktop publishing but it is ideal for home and small business use. Regrettably, since the demise of "InCider/A+" (which used to have a regular DTP section called Press Room) there is very little reference material on this subject specific to the Apple IIgs. Press Room presented templates and suggestions which allowed for printing of items as diverse as invitations for children's birthday parties, letterheads, business cards, customised stationery and newsletters.
Mostly Press Room's recommended applications were Publish It!, which can run on a wide range of Apple IIs, or the page layout module of AppleWorks GS, which is IIgs specific. However, Publish It! is not able to drive high resolution printers at greater than 150 dots per inch (dpi) and AppleWorks GS lacks many of the most desirable features of a DTP application - features like automatic scrolling, selectable measurement systems for the rulers, variable kerning and page titling.
Learning to use an Apple IIgs to produce high quality, desktop published material has been a long but interesting exercise. The purpose of this series of articles is to summarise the lessons learned in the hope that they may prove useful to other Apple IIgs users.
Hardware requirements
The minimum hardware requirements to commence DTP are:
* Apple IIgs with at least 2 megabytes of memory;
* monochrome or colour monitor;
* one 3.5 inch drive;
* a 9 pin dot-matrix printer, such as an ImageWriter II.
While this combination will get the job done you may find the time needed to be excessive while output to a 9 pin dot-matrix printer will be limited in quality. Interestingly, I have found a monochrome monitor easier to read than colour.
A few optional extras are well worthwhile if the budget can stretch to it:
* an accelerator, such as the ZIP GS;
* additional memory, as much as is affordable up to the 8 megabyte limit;
* a hard disk drive;
* a scanner such as Quickie from Vitesse;
* a high resolution printer, such as the Hewlett Packard LaserJet and DeskJet.
The accelerator allows most GS software to run more quickly and nowhere is this noticed more than in DTP. In my experience 8 megabytes of memory is nearly essential especially if printing at high resolution in landscape mode (i.e. across the page rather than down). The reasons for this will be discussed later. The scanner is useful for inserting illustrations and large amounts of text without the requirement to retype it. The hard disk drive allows for speedy storage and recovery of data files which may be several hundred kilobytes in size. Finally, the high resolution printer generates (almost) professional looking pages. This makes all the work worthwhile.
Software requirements
Essential software includes:
* AppleWorks (GS or Classic) formerly from Claris and now from Quality Computers;
* Teach, which comes with System 6;
* GraphicWriter III from Seven Hills Software;
* Independence from Seven Hills Software or Harmonie HP from Vitesse, if using a Hewlett Packard LaserJet or DeskJet printer.
I recommend using a word processor for writing and editing of the material to be published. Although some DTP software includes dictionaries, search and replace, etc I have not found these applications as flexible as a proper word processor. AppleWorks Classic files can be directly imported into GraphicWriter III. AppleWorks GS files can't be directly imported but there is a work around for this which uses Teach. Independence or Harmonie is required to drive a DeskJet or LaserJet.
Desirable options include:
* scanner software, such as Quickie from Vitesse which comes with the scanner;
* optical character recognition software, such as InWords from WestCode;
* Pointless and TypeSet - both from WestCode;
* Express from Seven Hills Software.
Pointless makes the job of the desktop publisher so much easier. Invariably, in the old days, the size of font required in a particular case was the one which was not in the System:Fonts folder. Under Pointless this situation never arises with all sizes instantly available. TypeSet is useful if your fonts folder contains a large number of
fonts. By allowing them to be grouped into smaller sets you can have available as many fonts as you need without having to scroll through a list of 50 just to get one symbol from Zapf Dingbats. Express is really not an option at all - it is virtually essential. Any DTP file of more than a few pages takes too long to print directly, especially at high resolution. Express gets around this problem very effectively.
Next month part 2 will deal with the various planning factors which require consideration.
All software mentioned above can be purchased from Jeff at II Series Software (02)606-9343.

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