System 6.0.5 is out there. Should you switch? Yes, if you have an fx, ci or Portable. For “the rest of us” it is a tossup. Some people say there are worthwhile enhancements. Others say “minor bug fixes and no really new features.”
Despite System 7.0’s “On-Cue-like” features, ICOM Simulations promises an upgraded OnCue will be worth it and will survive the assault of System 7.0.
If you use ReadySetGo (there he goes again!!!), some service bureaus won’t guarantee good printout unless you let them run a few test pages first. Also, with RSG files you must provide RSG’s hyphenation exceptions file on disk to the service bureau to get accurate output. You may even have to furnish your copy of RSG on disk.
Besides Stuffit, new compression software includes Diamond and Disk Doubler. Disk Doubler is reputed to be more efficient than Stuffit, but can only compress one file per archive. Take you pick.
If you have guts enough to open up your Mac, get “Macintosh Repair and Upgrade Secrets,” by Larry Pina, Howard W. Sams, $32.95. I got one for a client, who immediately ordered two more copies.
For lawyers: Nisus 2.1 provides “pleading page numbers” for lines, which legal briefs need. It also has strikethrough, which lawyers need. (Because they make so many mistakes, Steve B.?????)
Macintalk will not work with System 7.0, but Apple will have a new speech utility soon. Macintalk is one of the oldest Mac utilities. The date on mine is Jan. 1, 1983.
You can kern positive amounts in MacDraw and other programs without kerning features. Place your cursor between the letter pair to kern. Specify a very small character size and type a single space. For example, I kerned a pair of 70 point letters using a 9 pt. extra space between them.
Help, Programmers: Anyone know a simple way to default a LaserWriter to Black & White instead of Color/Greyscale?
I understand that the B&W setting is faster, and I would like it to be the default.
This must be simple! Someone answer up. Please!
An all-caps document? What a bore! Copy it, open McSink DA, select Capitalize Sentences and take the text back where it came from.
I don’t know about you, but I think the screen redraw times with Adobe’s ATM installed are just horrendous! If I didn’t do a lot of work with clients standing over my shoulder watching the screen, I would trash it RIGHT NOW!
And of course I never know if really small text is boldface or not.
This leads me to wonder if Font Freedom, $49.95 list) will be better. Let’s hope so! I know a highly competent font guy who runs a graphics shop who has removed ATM. He can’t stand it.
Wanna 6.5 gigabyte drive? Try Pinnacle Optical Storage System at $9995 plus $995 for an interface kit. It’s a CD-ROM jukebox changes.
Pinnacle also has a 3.5 erasable optical drive with “disks” the same size as your floppies. At 28 ms access time, it is in the hard disk “ballpark” for speed.
The Outbound, now advertised, is a portable Mac which uses your Plus or SE CPU. You still get to use your regular Plus or SE when you “dock” the Outbound to it when you get home. The CPU stays in the Outbound.
For $99 you can get Color MacCheese, a low-cost color paint program. Or try Easy Color Paint, $55, or Deneba’s UltraPaint for $199. For B&W, try Amazing Paint from CE Software for $79.95.
Rival is a $99 cdev which checks disks for viruses as they are opened. It works transparently.
NanoDisk from Technology Works automatically saves RAM disk data to a hard disk. It requires 16 megs of memory to work, however.
DeskPaint/DeskDraw 3.0 is out. If you love earlier versions, you’ll go nuts over this one. Color is supported, PICT II is supported, it has grayscale, filters, rulers, soften, blend, smart lasso, graduated fills, free rotate, distort and multiple windows.
DeskDraw 3.0 has rulers, arrows, multiple text styles in a block, hairlines and superfine alignment and positioning.
The pair are itty-bitty, work from within any application and reduce the need for MultiFinder.
Making tables in Word 4.0:
• You seldom need to specify the number of rows, since a return will add a row for you. You don’t have to use the standard margins of the rest of the document. Set your own for the table itself.
• Use Show ¶ from Edit to see the edges of table cells.
• Option/click selects a column, double click selects a row and Option/double click selects the whole table.
• Use Page Preview early on to see how you are doing.
• Resize columns by clicking the little ruler icon at the right of the big ruler. You get little ‘T’ markers. Grab one and move it and all cell columns to the right of the marker grabbed will resize. To move just one marker, hold down the Shift key while moving it.
• To help size columns, type in the longest piece of text which will appear in a single cell. Using this sample, resize the cell.
• A table is an easy way to do a letterhead with graphic(s) and text. Use First Page Header and call for a table. Establish columns for the elements of the letterhead. Move the columns for size. Paste your graphics in where desired and type letterhead text into the appropriate column in the table. The resulting letterhead will only show up on the first page of any letter you type. Save this doc as a letterhead template and “plus” it into your Work menu. (If you don’t know what that means, back to the manual for you!)
The board swap to make a Mac II into a Mac IIfx is a reasonable $2995. Maybe even discounted a little from that figure, too. MacWidow, please, please???
To speed up a Mac II on the cheap, try a MacSprint board. I have seen them for $209. They do make a perceptible difference. I know. I have one. Turn it off after using it awhile and you will see what I mean.
If you use LaserWriter driver 6.0, you will need Print Monitor 1.3, not 1.2. Crashes and failure to print will tell you that you need to upgrade.
And while we are on the subject, Print Monitor may need its MultiFinder partition increased. Command/I and raise it a little. (Thanks, MadMacNews, Madison WI MUG.)
I don’t care what you heard! Do NOT punch holes in 800k disks to make them into 1.4 meg disks. The medium is DIFFERENT. You WILL lose data. It may take 30 to 60 days, but you will lose data.
Also, do not format 1.4 meg disks as 800. Among other things, you can’t get back to 1.4 meg. And, again, the medium is NOT THE SAME.
You can go to the Paragraph dialog box in Word 4.0 by clicking on the numbers in the ruler. Or on a margin marker.
T-Maker came up with these hints for WriteNow 2.2:
• Try Copy and Paste Font/Size/Style command under the Edit menu. Select some styled text, choose Copy Font/Size/Style. Select the paragraph(s) to receive that style. Paste Font/Size/Style.
• To select dialog box items, type the letter the button starts with along with the Command key.
If you like to scale bitmaps, do it in a draw program for cleaner results.
Word (no surprise) and MacDraw (surprise) have private clipboards. That is why funny things happen to Copy/Paste in those programs. If you run into this weirdness, Paste to the Scrapbook, then Copy and Paste out of it.
A “too much recursion” message in HyperCard may mean that you should upgrade to 1.2.2 or better.
Envelopes glued along the edges, not the standard ones glued down the back, are better for use in the LaserWriter II. (Thanks, Cheezy Bits, Ellensburg, WA M.O.U.S.E.)
You will almost never outrun the power of Word 4.0’s feature laden program, even if it does have a half-assed interface. To browse in Power-land, use the List button under Commands... in the Edit menu. Now print out the list of available commands. There are some doozies there, and you can have any one you want in your regular menus. Just follow the manual’s instructions.
Hint: Command/Option/+ is one helpful keystroke. You can put almost anything into a Word 4.0 menu with that keystroke.
DeskWriter owners: If a document which should be on one page prints the last few lines on a second page, choose legal size in Page Setup, even if you are not printing on legal paper. Everything now prints on one page. There must be another answer, but what the hell, this one works. (Thanks, Gayle Lewis, CMUG member, Lincoln City, OR.)
On Location.
I don’t need to say more. This is a “Gofer” text finder DA which is FAST. Type in the find string, and before you can lift your eyes to the screen, all the files containing that string are already on screen.
If On Location gets any faster, it will have to have a little pre-cognition built in.
If you successfully kerned a pair of letters in PageMaker, you can highlight the kerning space, Copy, and Paste it between other identical pairs to be kerned. (Thanks, Personal Publishing magazine.)
If you have an item in a desktop publishing program which causes annoying page redrawing time every time you move around the page (TypeStyler files, graduated fill files, etc.) use a placeholder until the last moment before printing. Then replace the placeholder with a problem graphic.
Let’s say you want a line of type to fill a specific rectangular space in PageMaker. Here are two ways to achieve that:
• Change the type size until it is the right height. Now go to Spacing under the Type menu and adjust spacing until the width of the type is also correct.
• Another way is to click the text block with the pointer tool. Now Copy. Open the Scrapbook and Paste. Close the Scrapbook. Place the Scrapbook. Your first page is your text block. Now click the Placing tool anywhere in the Toolbox to cancel the rest of the Place. The text block is now a graphic. Grab a corner and distort it to fit the space it needs to fill.
• If you need rotated text, do the text in DeskDraw with Stretchable Type selected. Rotate it. Copy and Paste into PageMaker. Once again, you have complete control over the height and width of this “graphic.”
If you run into strange expensive pricing for recharging SX toner cartridges for LaserWriter II printers, and these arrangements include a replacement drum, please understand what is going on. Original Canon SX cartridges are notably poor for not lasting through three rechargings, as the original LaserWriters with CX cartridges always do. So, inevitably, someone came up with a better drum to lat through repeated recharging.
Of course, Canon hates that, since they miss out on selling you a new cartridge every time. If your recharger supplies a replacement drum, the only way they can recover the cost is to amortize the new drum over several rechargings. If you don’t pay up front in some fashion, the recharger is out of luck. So they have to sell you a package which includes the replacement drum and a set number of recharges. This way the recharger can recover the drum cost.
This process is well worthwhile, so buy into it. For more information, contact Sharon Quercioli at Tech•Nique, 708-529-7888. Their ad is in this issue of Mouse Droppings.
Remember, if you don’t use a better drum, your SX cartridge will almost certainly not last during a single recharging. In fact many do not last through the initial supply of toner as new cartridges.
If you waited six months to a year to read a reprint of that great Mouse Droppings article because you are not a subscriber, why not subscribe. The tariff is $24 in the Corvallis geographic area, and $20 elsewhere for out-of-area membership.
Since you are reading Mouse Droppings right now, drop your copy on a Mac-Friend. Do ‘em a favor.
Mouse Droppings also makes a perfect gift for that Mac owner you don’t know what to buy for, except for super-expensive accelerators and stuff.
Some people aren’t paying attention. The Winter/Spring 1990 BMUG giant newsletter reports that ATM won’t let you keep your printer font icons anywhere but in the System Folder.
Wrong, Benguiat Breath! Mine are not even in the same partition on my hard drive!
I say again: SetPaths DA! Tell it to Build Path to your folder full of printer font icons (and a lot of other stuff you want to hide somewhere instead of in the System Folder). Now your Mac and ATM can find those things without a hitch.
I guess I am condemned to repeat this hint every six months for those who haven’t gotten it yet.
If you manually reset leading to a smaller value in PageMaker and the tops of the letters look funny, jiggle the lower right corner of the screen a bit and a redraw will show you the letters correctly.
Did you ever get a folder full of word processor documents which a friend thought you would like to read? And you keep procrastinating because it is a royal pain to open each one up to look at it?
Well, I mentioned On Location before. But it has another use. Index the folder with On Location. That takes about 20 seconds. Now you can double click on those documents in the On Location window and read, Copy and Paste to your heart’s content.
How many boards can be used in a Mac II series computer? Six? Well, there ARE six slots! But you can only use a total of 83.4 watts on a II, IIx or IIfx. On the IIcx and IIci, you are limited to 41.7 watts. (Thanks to The NotePad, Springfield IL MUG.)
If OnCue acts up when you use FullWrite Professional, get FWP Diddler from Ashton Tate. (Thanks again to The NotePad.)
Mac IIs made between March 1987 and January 1988 won’t work with some NuBus cards. If you have a problem, see your Apple dealer for a free upgrade. The ROMs in these machines are Revision A.
A ReadySetGo user spilled the beans about OnLocation. Uh-uh, it won’t read RSG documents. But it does read PageMaker, thank you very much.
To download Adobe fonts to a Varityper printer, use Downloader 3.30v, except for Times Roman and Helvetica. Download those with Downloader 3.0b. (Thanks, Whit Patrick, of MUGPort for the last two items.)
With MultiFinder and lots of RAM (do Virtual ring a bell?), you can have two PageMaker (or Pixel Paint, or Double Helix) documents open at one time. Simply Command/D on the application. Rename the copy something like PageMaker II. Open it and your original and move quickly back and forth between two open PageMaker documents using MultiFinder.
Does your screen collect dust like a magnet? Here’s a suggestion from Washington Apple Pi. Wipe it with an anti-static cloth used for automatic clothes dryers. Try it out first on a piece of plain glass, or a corner of your screen. There are several brands with different amounts of chemical in them, so experiment. Use a clean soft cloth on the screen after the anti-static cloth.
