|
 |
|
|
|
Economy Desktop Publishing Arrivesby D. J. Haynes Because small-business owners wear so many different hats, they'll appreciate the new easy-to-use desktop publishing software that's on the market these days. The new programs are fairly inexpensive products that can help you quickly design your material and get on with the other tasks needed to run your business. With the right software, your computer becomes a typesetting and document layout powerhouse. All without the need for you to learn the intricate and sometimes painstaking art of typesetting. One of the biggest events for DTP was the release of Windows 95. The Windows 95 assault announced that desktop publishing, in particular, was one area that would benefit from the wonders of the new 32-bit operating system. Despite all the ballyhoo, recent industry news reports have shown that the business community has been slow to adopt Windows 95, and the related 32-bit software on the market. So, it's hard to decide if Windows 95 is the best thing to happen to desktop publishing (DTP) or not. I will note that the three Windows programs I reviewed are all 32-bit applications. One thing's for sure, the number of existing players in the DTP arena is dwindling. This is probably due to a number of factors, including improvements made to word processors over the past few years. In many cases, it's often just as efficient to use WordPerfect or Microsoft Word to lay out smaller documents. For the purpose of this article I will be reviewing four economy-minded products: Adobe Paint & Publisher for the Macintosh, Corel Ventura 7, Microsoft Publisher 97, and Serif PagePlus Publishing Suite, all for Windows 95. OK, really three economy minded products and Ventura, which is arguably a high-end product, due to its tremendous power and high learning curve. Historically, DTP software falls into one of two categories: Professional packages such as QuarkXPress, PageMaker, FrameMaker and Ventura, which are used by many book and magazine publishers and professional designers; and low-end programs, which are for those who create occasional publications, such as company brochures, simple fliers, and so on. Whether you need to step up to a professional package depends primarily on what kinds of documents you want to create. The differences in the two DTP categories, however, have become less discernible over time. Serif's PagePlus and Corel Ventura are quite efficient at creating the pre-press color separations necessary to run full-color documents on a printing press. This was once the exclusive realm of such high-end programs as Quark XPress. Still, Ventura is the only product reviewed here that is adept at creating long documents comprising several chapters or sections. The strength of the economical packages tends to be their ease of use. Although easy-to-use can mean fewer features and less power, this is generally not the case with the four programs here. Instead, they make those features and that power easier to wield by providing templates, helpful tips, wizards, and other mechanisms to help you lay out your documents. Traditionally, Microsoft Publisher has led the way in usability. The Wizard features and on screen tips, which take the user down a predefined path, have taken almost all the guesswork out of basic document layout. The new Windows 97 version provides even more help with newly designed dialog boxes that offer visual guides to help you make decisions. The Fancy First Letter (know as drop capitals in other programs) dialog box, for example, lets you to select the style of the drop cap and where it you want it placed in relation to the paragraph from a list of examples. The other programs reviewed in this article provide various levels of help, but they're not as extensive as Publisher's. PagePlus, for instance, offers Page Hints in its templates that guide you though adding and formatting text and graphics. Ventura and Paint & Publish feature several professionally designed templates in which all you do is replace existing text and graphics with your own. Paint & Publish also provides AutoCreate, a feature similar to Microsoft Publisher's Wizards. When it comes to output, these four programs are very different in two significant ways. Microsoft Publisher and Adobe Paint & Publisher are basically designed for printing on your desktop laser or ink-jet printer. In addition to outputting on a laser or ink-jet printer, Corel Ventura and Serif PagePlus are quite good at preparing documents for the print shop or image bureau. The difference is each program's ability to print color separations. There are two basic types of color documents. Spot color is the type that's used in simple newsletters and stationery. It is the type of stuff you see in the local newspaper when an advertisement has a splash of color highlighting a title or word. Process color is used to print full-color ads and photographs, such as those used on the cover of a magazine. Each of these types of color process requires a different type of color separation. Although all four programs can print spot-color separations, only Ventura and PagePlus can print full-color process separations. What this means is that if you use process colors in your Adobe Super Paint & Home Publisher, or Microsoft Publisher layouts, the only way to reproduce them is on an output device that can print color, such as a color ink-jet or thermal wax printer. If you're ready for process separations, you may also be ready for a professional-strength DTP program. To review each program, I laid out two types of documents. The first was a one-page, full-color magazine cover, which tested each program's ability to import, place, and print color graphics and separations. My second test used two very long articles I had written. This allowed me to sample text formatting, style sheets, and some long-document features, such as page numbering, indexing, table of contents, and others. The results were interesting, as you'll see in the following reviews. Corel Ventura 7: Although Corel Ventura lacks the ease-of-use features of the other low-end DTP programs reviewed here, and the suggested list price of $599, for the CD-ROM version, makes the other programs I reviewed seem like bargains, Corel offers so many ways to get the software for $249, that I included it in the review as a low-cost alternative to other full-featured programs. You can, for example, get Ventura for less than $200 in a competitive upgrade from virtually any other desktop publishing program. You can also get this special upgrade price from any earlier version of Xerox Ventura Publisher or from CorelDraw 3, 4, 5, or 6. On a side note, CorelDraw 5.0, shipped with an earlier, more clunky version of Ventura as part of the program. Even at full price, Ventura still runs approximately $400 less than its major competitors, Adobe's PageMaker or Quark XPress. In my tests, Ventura completed all its tasks with relative ease. It has great process-color support, and its long-document features are some of the best in the business, topping even those of more expensive Quark XPress and PageMaker. In addition to solid multiple file compilation and management, Ventura creates tables of contents and indices very easily. It also automatically numbers and renumbers figures and tables, and it includes several special catalog and directory page-numbering options. All this power comes at a price, however. Ventura is not an easy program to learn and master, unless you're a CorelDraw user. Wherever possible, Corel made Ventura's interface resemble CorelDraw. Corel has done a great job of migrating most of the commands and options from the nested dialog boxes of earlier versions onto moveable palettes called Roll-ups. Ventura also uses CorelDraw's print, color management, and color creation dialog boxes, which are easy to use, and very powerful. In addition to all that power, you get an arsenal of extras and utilities, including the CorelMosaic image cataloging utility, 32,000 clip art images and symbols, 1,000 Type 1 and True Type fonts, 1,000 high resolution photos, 250 3-D models, and over 400 CorelDRAW and Paper Direct templates. Ventura also comes bundled with Corel Photo-Paint, a full-featured image editing program. Photo-Paint is second only to Adobe Photoshop for powerful image touch-up and enhancement, and it comes with several industry standard special-effects plug-ins. These extras alone may be worth the $495 price tag. But remember, don't buy it at full-price, get it as an upgrade for $199. There was a time when Ventura was owned by Xerox and called Ventura Publisher. It was ungainly and very difficult to learn and use. But Corel has turned it around and made Ventura a viable alternative for people who need brute-strength desktop publishing at a very reasonable price. Adobe Paint & Publish 2.1: The only Mac publishing program in this review, Adobe Paint & Publish is a combination page layout (HomePublisher) and paint (SuperPaint) bundle. Since acquiring HomePublisher, Adobe has added Adobe SuperPaint, a relatively full-featured image editing program for touching up photographs and creating graphics. Also included in this CD-ROM Deluxe version are 1,500 pieces of clip art, a handful of fonts, and 50 templates. HomePublisher fared well enough on the laying out of my mythical magazine cover, although it provided no way to print the full-color process separations. The program was great in laying out the pages for the articles. HomePublisher has a strong style sheets feature, making formatting multiple paragraphs a snap. It also imports style sheets from word processors, such as Microsoft Word and MacWrite II. Unfortunately, HomePublisher cannot compile multiple documents into one long book or manual, and it provides no way to generate even simple tables of contents or indices. One of HomePublisher's most interesting features is AutoCreate. Similar to Microsoft Publisher's Wizards, AutoCreate uses a set of scripts to create a layout according to your specifications. The script prompts you for document size, number of columns, tone, and several other settings and then creates a template based on your responses. You can even fill in headlines, headers and footers, and captions during the AutoCreate process, and the program automatically places them in the document. The program supports spot-color separations as well as crop and press registration marks, making reproducing two- and three-color documents at the print shop easier. You can even use the color palette to display objects on separate color plates. If you have only a monochrome monitor, this feature helps to print your separations correctly. Disappointingly, HomePublisher does not support the Pantone Matching System (PMS) spot-color model. You'll have to pick your colors from a swatch book after you get to the print shop. Professionals typically work the other way around, adding color as they design their document. The inclusion of SuperPaint makes HomePublisher an especially good value. Although not as powerful as Ventura or Adobe's own PageMaker, it is great at newsletters, brochures, and other short documents -- especially on a modestly equipped Macintosh. HomePublisher includes 200 clip-art images, design templates, 12 fonts, and specialty paper. Includes automatic features for page flow, copyfitting, and other tasks, plus graphics and color controls, interactive previews, and a fully integrated word processor. Microsoft Publisher 97: Microsoft Publisher approaches page layout with the attitude that most people don't want to learn desktop publishing, they just want to get their documents laid out. So, what you get is a somewhat quirky but quite capable DTP program. Microsoft Publisher 97 did not fare well on the first part of my test. It could not print the full-color separations needed for my mythical magazine cover. It did somewhat better in my test of compiling long documents. But, not as good as some of the other programs I reviewed. So why do I still think it's a great buy? Mainly because it provides excellent control over text formatting and graphics importing. Its page numbering and other basic layout options are very good. The program is exceptionally good for those who need to whip out their documents fast; especially at the price of only $79.95. The program has a treasure trove of easy-to-use features, including Wizards that query you with style and content questions and then create a document based on your responses. All you do is pour in your text and graphics. In addition to Wizards and the Help system (context-sensitive tips), the program now supports PageWizards that walk you though the creation of about 20 different common documents. A Design Gallery contains pre-designed page elements, such as banners, that you simply drag into your document and add your own text or graphics to. One interesting feature is Publisher's ability to open Microsoft Word automatically when you need to edit text extensively. I was also impressed with the Layout Checker, which looks over the document and points out layout problems and makes suggestions on how to correct them. Microsoft Publisher's use of "understandable terminology" for common desktop publishing terms, however, means that drop caps are called Fancy First Letters, for example, and kerning is called Character Spacing. Another area where Microsoft seems to listen to its own drums is in printing and applying color. It does not support the Pantone Matching System, the industry standard spot-color matching process, nor does it support process-color separations. The program does print a checklist for users to take to the print shop with them, but colors are defined in RGB (red, green, and blue) values rather than the industry standard CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black). Monitors use RGB values, but few print shops know what to do with RGB definitions. The lack of these features may not be important to non-desktop publishers, who are only interested in getting their documents out quickly and painlessly. And if that's all you want to do, what Microsoft Publisher lacks in power it makes up for in convenience. Microsoft has been putting a Web spin on many of its new products, and Publisher 97 is no exception. It includes 15 Web site PageWizards, that let the user quickly create a Web site. It's not as sophisticated as Microsoft Front Page, but I think it does use some of the same technology for page creation. Also, you can now choose from among 150 TrueType fonts and 5,000 clip-art images. Microsoft also offers a free online resource, Clip Gallery Live, where Publisher users can download additional free clip-art. Serif Pageplus Publishing Suite: Ever since version 1.0, Serif has made sure that PagePlus is a step ahead and a great value. That first version offered spot-color separations and artistic text manipulation; version 2.0 was the first inexpensive package to offer process-color separations; and so on. The new Serif PagePlus 4 Professional Edition CD-ROM is no exception. I don't know how they do it. Serif continues to pack more useful features into PagePlus while keeping the cost down. Now, with its new PagePlus 4 Professional Edition, Serif has taken another significant step by providing all the publishing power most of us will ever need -- page layout, word processing, drawing, image editing, loads of fonts, and tons of clip art -- in one affordable package ($199 street price). At the suite's core is PagePlus 4.0. Included among the features are automatic hyphenation, a tab and leader ruler, Hints and Tips, and document creation of up to 999 pages. Like PageMaker, PagePlus uses a pasteboard table metaphor. The interface actually resembles a printing press stripper's workstation. Though you can create long publications with PagePlus, it didn't pass the test because it can't automatically generate indices and tables of contents -- two features essential for long-document creation. The program is more suitable for shorter, business-oriented documents, such as newsletters or brochures. Version 4.0 includes event-driven hints and tips, multimedia demos, layout checking, and links to pertinent help topics in all dialog boxes. Among the other packages reviewed here, these are options available only in Microsoft Publisher and should make PagePlus simple to learn and use. In addition to all the learning aids, an innovative ease-of-use option lets you customize the interface to three levels of difficulty: Intro, Publisher, and Professional. Although not quite as automatic as Publisher, PagePlus holds its own in the ease-of-use department. As impressive as PagePlus's layout prowess is, the other stuff bundled on the CD-ROM greatly enhances the program's value. In addition to PagePlus, you get TypePlus, a type special-effects package similar to Adobe's TypeAlign, which allows you to fit text to a path, warp it, fill it with special effects, and so forth. DrawPlus lets you work with vector images. TablePlus lets you create spreadsheet-like tables. PhotoPlus lets you edit photographs. There are all kinds of fonts and clip art. All that would really help this program is better support for long documents. It would then truly be a great low-cost alternative to PageMaker. Combine PagePlus's brute page layout strength with all these useful applets and what do you get? More desktop publishing power than most people will need in their lifetimes. In fact, it's probably more than you will ever need. But at such a great price, it's worth it. Conclusions: In the page layout software market, companies strike a balance between ease of use and features. Microsoft Publisher 97, for example, almost completely insulates the user from the page layout process with automation and prefabricated documents. Corel Ventura's power requires you to learn desktop publishing concepts and techniques. PagePlus offers value by throwing in almost all the software you'll ever need to complete your layouts, and Adobe System's SuperPaint & HomePublisher provides power and ease of use to the Macintosh market. D.J. Haynes is a graphic designer, Web page designer and freelance writer living in Georgia. He compiles a number of publications each month for a local college using various DTP programs. |
| Suits | Ponytails | Propheads | Contact WDJ | Discuss | Web Audio | Search |