We talked about SIMM doublers on page 18 of the October issue. SIMM doublers let you use leftover 256k chips to upgrade a Plus or an SE. SIMM Doublers (less the chips) are $99 for a Plus or $139 for an SE. Call Computer Care,, 800-950-2273. We had a letter from a Taiwan member asking where they could be obtained.
Hit the “wrong” key in Word and you may find something useful. Word is absolutely FULL of keyboard equiv alents, including some very weird stuff.
Here’s a possible Mac II upgrade. Replace the 68881 with a 68882. It fits and it doubles the old chip’s speed. (Thanks, MacWeek—you REALLY ought to subscribe!)
Adobe’s ATM (Adobe Type Manager) is selling like hotcakes. Pay $55± street, not $99 list.
Surprise! You can create a card on a 2-meg Mac which won’t open on a 1-meg Mac.
It may be necessary to quit HyperCard to the Finder regularly and then reopen it again during a single session. Groan!
Got a virus in a Stuffit file? Most virus detection programs can’t find it there. You’ll have to unstuff it first.
This knowledge might change your routine on receiving stuffed files from other owners. Unstuff, check for a virus, then put it on your hard disk.
There are bunches of Com mand/ Shift key sequences in MacDraw II which you should try. For example, try G for ungroup, H to unlock, S to Save As…. Poke around and find others.
Better yet, why not read the manual. Oh, heresy of heresies!
If screen redraws are slowing down because of ATM, change ATM’s font cache upward, if you have enough RAM. By the way, one of the joys of ATM is how it makes text look in graphics programs.
I haven’t tried PublishIt! yet, but I do have a warning. Don’t believe reviews by persons who are not familiar with either PageMaker, ReadySetGo or QuarkXpress. In fact, since PageMaker, whether you like it or not, has a lock on the low and middle DTP field, new DTP programs should at least be compared with PageMaker.
If you are sitting there with two other people, one of you is a bird watcher. That’s what the stats show. There are 80 million bird watchers in the U.S.
So what? So now there is BirdBrain, a Mac birding database. It will keep track of your tufted titmouse sightings. BirdBrain contains a reference base of all known North American birds and page number citations for all the major field guides.
For serious bird watchers (30 million out of the 80 million), BirdBrain is probably reason enough to buy a Mac. Bird Brain is $125, Ideaform, Inc., P.O. Box 1540, Fairfield, IA 52556, (515) 472-7256.
Just read some network messages from a former MS-DOS user who bought a Mac IIcx and Word 4.0. He only found six fonts and six sizes in Word and he is griped because people told him the Mac was easy to use.
It is, dummy. Those “friends” probably also told you not to read the manual. Read it!
To get more fonts (if you have installed them), hit Command/D, then hit Option/Command/+. This will give you a great big plus cursor. Click on the font you want to see in the menu and it will be there from then on.
Aldus made both PageMaker and Free hand. This means major compati bility between the two.
For example, Save As… an individual block of text as a new PageMaker document. Hold down Option while clicking OK in the Print dialog box. In the PostScript dialog that follows, check Download Postscript Fonts, Print Postscript to disk and EPS. Click Set File Name and give it a name ending in .eps. Now open Freehand and Place this .eps file. (Thanks, LAMUG.)
Another compatibility gain—you only need one Aldus Prep file to handle both programs.
O Say Can You See eps files? Not if they are gray boxes. But if you have SmartArt DA, open the file, reimage and save it. Voilá! Now you see the actual picture when you import into Page Maker. If you use a lot of this kind of art, this is a biggie of a hint.
To convert an Adobe Illustrator file to PICT format, import it into CricketDraw. It is now PICT. Take it to the Scrapbook and put it where you want it in PICT format.
Here’s an easier way: Select the image and Option/Copy. You get a PICT version with embedded eps data on the Clipboard.
Once I facetiously typed in a joke name when asked to customize an application. I later wished I hadn’t done that. It wasn’t funny any more.
Now, on UseNet, comes a fix. It works with Microsoft products and probably Claris, too.
Enter FEdit or any program like it. Set the “logical EOFD (end of file) of the data fork to 0 (zero). Since the customized information is the only thing in the data fork, the next time you open the application, it will ask you to customize it again.
If there is a serial number involved, be sure you have it noted down somewhere, because you are going to need it.
Of course, if you kept a clean, uncustomized copy on a locked floppy, you don’t have to do that. Just trash the working copy and move a clean copy over to the working disk or hard disk.
Be careful when using FEdit. Work ONLY on a copy.
For $299 you can get a 2400 baud modem which turns your Mac into a FAX machine for sending (not receiving). It sends any Mac document to any Group III FAX machine in the world. ProModem 2400MFAX, Prometheus Products, 7225 SW Bonita Rd., Tigard, OR 97223, (800) 477-3473, ext. 165.
Have leftover 256k SIMMS? Technology Works, (800) 662-2210, will buy them back at $80 a meg. Is there a catch?
If true, buy your 1 meg chips at around $79 to $95 a meg and end up paying from -$1 to +$15 for the upgrade. Sounds good to me.
BTW, when calling chip compan ies which do not match the lowest price you have seen, ask for a better price. Have you ever heard of haggling?
I got a $95 quote when the ad said $98 and my initial query got a $98 price. Then I went to Chip Merchant anyway and paid $82. Of course Chip Merchant sells them for $79 as of this writing.
Shop around. Ask for a discount. What can they say? No? Who cares?
You can wait for chip prices to fall some more, but I wouldn’t, and if by the time you read this they are substantial ly below $79 a meg, then I am wrong.
Remember, 7.0 is around the corner, and it needs 2 megs, so that may drive prices back up again.
If your SE screen jitters, tell the Apple dealer you want Apple Authori zation OM4617. You’ll get a free new motherboard and a quieter fan—no more screen jitter. But, beware. The new motherboard has been known to cause problems, so you may prefer to get a third party fan instead. (Thanks, Washington Apple Pi Journal.)
Word 4.0’s tables aren’t very “exportable.” (I knew there must be a catch.) To export one, turn off “Show hidden text” in the Edit menu. Now highlight the table. Hit Command/Op tion/ D. You now have a PICT table on the Clipboard. Save it to the Scrapbook and stick it where you need it.
If a formula is not accepted in Excel, remove its = sign. Now you can poke around and locate the problem. When ready, reinsert the = sign and see if it works now. (Thanks Boston Com puter Society Active Voice.)
To find an oddball character in Word, type it, highlight it, and click in the box on the lower left corner of the screen (where the page number ap pears). You get the character’s ASCII number. Now use Find… and tell the Mac to find ^number (a caret followed by the ASCII number you found). (Thanks, Washington Apple Pi Journal, which is now pretty well back on track after a rough few months.)
Aldus has a new magazine, and it looks just great. It does try in some cases to disguise which platform PageMaker was used on—Mac or MS-DOS. If you look closely, little clues tell you that it’s almost always a Mac which is being used. This is a beautiful, useful mag azine for Aldus product users.
If you have trouble making legal size paper print right in PageMaker, version 3.02 fixes it. If you are running 3.01 (I hope not 3.0), the cure is to go to Change in the Print dialog. Select another printer (any printer) and then reselect the correct printer. Now make sure Legal size is selected and that you are using Aldus Prep, not Apple’s LaserPrep. Print. Everything will be fine.
Indulge me and experiment with the lasso vs. the marque and the text tool vs. the pointer for selecting text. Also experiment with Paste vs. Place for graphics and text. Observe what happens to backgrounds (trans parent vs. opaque). Try Place instead of Copy/Paste from a Scrapbook. See what happens when you select several objects, take them to the Scrapbook and then Copy/Paste or Place them back into PageMaker. Try every conceivable combination. Label each method and print them all out. You will indeed learn something.
Here is a fun thing to do in Page Maker. Import a bitmapped graph ic (large is best). Stretch it to cover a whole page. Use Image Control and gray it out. Now Place text on top of the graphic, using the graphic as a back ground. Be sure you get the back ground graphic light enough. This is fun.
TIFF images are best in Aldus Freehand.
To crop a graphic in Freehand draw an ungrouped closed single path shape. Reshape until it is just right. Select the graphic itself, Cut, select the shape you just drew and choose “Paste Inside.” Readjust with the handles on the path.
“Stay away from MS-DOS ports,” Don Shupe of Ellensburg, WA M.O.U.S.E writes. He means don’t buy programs like FoxBaseMac and Word Perfect, which retain all-too-much of their MS-DOS heritage. They suck.
On the other hand, MS-DOSsers should get down on their knees and thank the Mac for ports from the Mac like PageMaker, Excel, etc.
One more time. MacWeek is great. $75 a year, P.O. Box 5821, Cherry Hill, NJ 08034. It’s weekly, so that’s about $1.50 an issue.
Apple seems to have switched CRT (your screen and tube) vendors for newer Plusses and SEs. The Samsung they are reportedly using has focus and spotting problems.
Advice about the LQ printer. Don’t. Wait for better printer drivers, now being worked on, then buy an Epson wide carriage printer. I’m no expert, but I tend to agree with this advice from MacPack in Richardson, TX.
The marks are beginning to come in on Adobe’s ATM software. Great large size print out of the Imagewriter. Boston, Palencia, etc. are still better for small sizes. Slight slowdown on the screen as the fonts form. No advantage except a nicer, more accurate screen look for PostScript printers. Lots of space saved by removing all but a couple of sizes for each font. Some users have saved as much as 2 megs in the System Folder.
