In our recent reader survey, desktop publishing (known as DTP) was cited by many readers as an application in which they were interested and intended to buy a suitable package. As you may know, many software houses, including BEEBUG, have been developing DTP packages, but it is Acorn who are first in the field. Is this going to be the definitive DTP package for the Archimedes, or would you do better to wait? I hope to give you some guidance on answering that question in the course of this review. Here at BEEBUG, we have been using DTP (though on an Apple Macintosh) to originate both BEEBUG and RISC User for over two years now.
For those who are not really sure what DTP is all about, a brief introduction. DTP is concerned with the design and layout of both text and graphics on the page for printing. It usually gives considerable control over the appearance of text, including choice of font and size, less so with regard to graphics. Most DTP packages include some word processing capability and some rudimentary drawing tools, and there is obviously an overlap here with other applications.
In one respect, it is not surprising that Acorn's DTP package has appeared first. It is not completely new, but a rewrite of Timeworks Desktop Publisher for the Atari ST and PC market, where it has achieved some success as a low cost DTP package. Desktop Publisher for the Archimedes is produced as an Acorn product, in the same way as 1st Word Plus, by GST.
The packaging is quite lavish, a very smart slip-in box and library case containing three discs, a relatively slim 140 page manual, and the inevitable keystrip. The three discs comprise a programs disc, a work disc, and an examples disc. In reviewing Acorn Desktop Publisher I propose first to describe its main features in order to give some indication of what it can do, and to try and convey something of its flavour. I will then consider some major issues of importance to anyone contemplating purchase, before giving my conclusions.
Like all good RISC OS software, Acorn DTP is installed as an application on the icon bar. Double clicking on this opens a window which will contain the page you are working on, and a second window which allows the choice of one of four tools: Frame, Text, Paragraph, and Graphics. All functions within Acorn DTP fall into one of these four categories or modes.
All pages have a default format, a master page and may use one or more style sheets. The page format determines the size of paper you are working with (A4 etc), its orientation (portrait or landscape), and whether left- and right-hand pages are to the same format. Note that the page format can only be altered before you start work on a document, otherwise the default (A4 size) is used.
All text and graphics is laid out within frames. The master page allows you to set a standard which will be used by all pages in a particular document, for example number, size and position of columns. You can also establish separate masters for left- and right-hand pages.
Style sheets are used to determine the style of a paragraph, including choice of point size (the way in which character size is measured), font (e.g. Courier, Helvetica etc.), and style (bold, italic, underline etc.). Style sheets also control justification, tab settings, hyphenation, spacing algorithms and leading (pronounced 'ledding' - the spacing between lines). Four style sheets are provided as standard; you can modify these as well as designing your own. The style sheet called body text is used as the default. However, choice of font, point size and style can also be controlled independently of style sheets.
I created a document to test the package after working through the tutorial sections of the manual. The first step was to set up the two column format that I required on the master page, and I decided to position a box centrally at the top containing a title 'white-out' on a dark grey background, and using a so-called drop-shadow frame. The frame tool allows you to create boxes, and to give a box one of four styles of border (three sizes of single line, one double line). To create a drop-shadow box, I had to create two frames, specifying that the border on one was to appear only at the right and at the bottom, and then positioning the two boxes one over the other. You can decide which box appears in front (or even make them transparent). I also selected a dark grey tint as the background for the box. I then entered the text for my title from the keyboard, put this in white, and created a new style sheet to get the appearance I wanted (see illustration) using the paragraph tool.
I then transferred an ASCII text file (one of the other articles in this issue of RISC User) into my document. This is a two stage process accomplished in frame mode, first accessing the text itself as it is necessary to fill each frame (in this case column) in turn. A dashed line at the foot of a box indicates that more of the story still remains to be positioned. Unfortunately, if the box has a frame this indicator is invisible! Acorn DTP will accept any ASCII text file, and files from Edit or 1st Word Plus including any style information already included at that stage.
In my trial document I tried to level up the last two columns to finish about halfway down the page, but this proved impossible. Fine adjustments like this can usually be made by adjusting the leading by fractions of a point (itself 1/72 of an inch). Acorn DTP will only allow leading to be specified to a whole number of points; the same is true of font size, quite a limitation when fine adjustments are needed.
Another small touch which I found difficult to achieve was to align the first lines of text in each column to appear under my central title box. Spacing can be controlled by placing frames around frames, but precise alignment could not be achieved, again not very professional. The title to the article was styled and positioned, but I could not make it move to the very top of the page, even when the top margin space in the relevant style sheet was set to zero. Recourse to the manual was little help on these points, but it appears that frames include a fixed amount of white space both inside and outside the frame to separate them from any text.
The text tool is used to enter text directly from the keyboard, and to edit it. There is a find (and replace) function, and the facility to cut (or copy) text to the clipboard, and to paste into the document text from the clipboard - you can also do this with frames including their contents. Text editing also controls kerning (the facility to alter the spacing between pairs of characters), and the use of a soft hyphen and a fixed space. I found that what editing I required was straightforward to achieve.
The final tool is for graphics or pictures. Acorn DTP can import two types of picture, image such as Paint might produce (in other words a sprite), and line art such as can be produced with Draw. Pictures of either type are loaded and positioned in boxes as with stories. Pictures can be rescaled or cropped, and the examples disc contains a good selection of both types. The graphics tool also allows a small number of lines and curves to be created within Acorn DTP (lines suitable for simple tables or diagrams, for example).
The printing of documents uses an improved set of the printer drivers supplied on the Applications disc, covering Epson dot matrix and compatible printers, Postscript printers, the Integrex 132 colour printer, and HP Laserjet and compatibles. Acorn recommends you replace your existing printer drivers with these latest versions for all printing.
Although Acorn DTP will run on a 1MByte machine (i.e. a 310 or 410) you need to give careful consideration to the choice of a suitable system. First of all, the software makes frequent reference to a 'work disc'. Using a floppy, you will spend most of your time (literally) waiting for the screen display to be refreshed. Performance can be improved quite a lot by allocating adequate font cache (as Acorn recommend), and speed is then acceptable for occasional use, but I consider a hard disc (see this month's review) to be essential for anyone intending to make regular substantial use of Acorn DTP.
I ran Acorn DTP on a 310 with 1MByte of memory. I found that provided I restricted myself to text only (no pictures), memory appeared to be sufficient. Incorporating pictures onto the page was also trouble-free at first, but any attempt to resize or crop a picture was unsuccessful because of insufficient memory. At least Acorn DTP coped without collapsing completely, but if you want to incorporate many pictures into your documents (particularly sprites) then I suggest that 2MBytes of memory are the minimum, and that means a 420, 440 or an A3000 upgraded to 2MBytes.
It also helps on a 1MByte machine to carry out all the editing without a printer driver installed, to save memory, using the printer driver only when printout is actually required. Again, with 2MBytes or more this constraint would disappear. In fact, system tuning is quite important to get the best performance from a product such as Acorn DTP, but to their credit, Acorn has provided detailed information on this.
There are also factors about Acorn DTP itself which you should be aware of. I have already mentioned the restriction to integer point sizes, which is much too large for the detailed adjustment needed for a really professional design. There are at present only five fonts available (one sans serif, three serif and one, usefully, of symbols), though using Acorn's new outline fonts for improved appearance. Only four styles of border can be added to a frame, and there is no frame editor. In addition you cannot control the amount of space separating a frame from the text inside or outside. There are separate clipboards for frames, text etc. but you cannot check what is on any clipboard. Style sheets only apply to paragraphs, not to selected blocks of text, so changing style through a document can involve changing the style sheet for each individual paragraph. Other limitations may also exist.
Menus use the standard approach of showing in bold options which are available, and in grey those which aren't. However, the main menu always shows all options in bold regardless of which tool or mode is current. You can, for example, select text from the main menu, only to find that in the text menu no options are available because you are not in text mode. To change mode means that Acorn DTP has to remove all menus and re-display the view of the current page. I know this conforms with Acorn's own guidelines, but it is frustrating nevertheless.
In fact, the degree to which Acorn DTP reconstructs the view of the current page is excessive. For example, using find & replace to search for a word which appeared twice in the text visible on the screen resulted in Acorn DTP refreshing the entire screen display on both occasions, although the only changes were to display the first occurrence of the word, and then the second, in inverse video. I cannot believe that it has to be as bad as it appears, though it may derive from the parentage of Acorn DTP on rather more primitive systems. However, this is only apparent when using a floppy-based system; with a hard disc all screen refreshes are commendably quick.
Lastly, I encountered two actual bugs. Highlighting one title line in order to change point size resulted in further characters of the next line becoming highlighted, such that any further changes of style applied to these too. This was consistently reproducible. On one occasion, loading a picture file from the supplied examples disc resulted in meaningless error messages and a completely hung machine from which the only escape was to press Ctrl-Break, causing the complete loss of all changes made to my current document since the time when it was last saved. Acorn says the latter can arise in any situation where your machine is working at its limits, and that it is not anything within DTP itself.
This is well written and produced, but the tutorial section is too short to give you real confidence in using the software, yet I feel that the reference section is too brief and lacking in really detailed information which might compensate. A package on this scale surely demands better coverage.
To what extent the limitations of Acorn DTP reflect those in the original PC version I do not know. You will just have to decide whether what is offered is adequate for your needs. My view at this time, is that you should not rush into buying Acorn Desktop Publisher, costing as it does a substantial £170 plus, until you have been able to examine some of the other offerings which will be appearing soon. You might also be interested to learn that Timeworks for the PC market costs under £90!
Product Acorn Desktop Publisher Supplier Acorn Computers Cambridge Technopark 645 Newmarket Road, Cambridge CB5 8PD. Tel. (0223) 241144 Price £171.35 inc. VAT (£162.78 to RISC User members direct from BEEBUG - add £3 for p&p.)