Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

joys of restyling pages of your
L favourite publications and Amiga
OComputing,
you will discover what a
T severe limitation the lack of a corporate
lsized
budget is.
o
Picture this. The latest version of the
nConlig
gazette lies before you.
g
resplendent in hi-res interlaced mode
on your wonderful monitor.
a
Your subscribers, recently reaching
fthe
heady heights of double figures, are
teagerly
awaiting the next edition
ecomplete
with witty insights on the Ring
r Road and severe condemnations of
yBangor
Marina.
o This is the point at which you realise
u
that — short of buying an extra 20
monitors and becoming the first useful
d
cable network — you have to find some
i
way of getting it on to nasty old
sfashioned
lo-tech paper.
c Now,' don't know you really well,
omostly
we've never met, but I suspect
vthat
you're the sort of person who would
ebe
only truly happy with at least 300 dpi
r output ( about the resolution of a laser
t
printer) and preferably a lot better.
Presumably you reckon you can't afford
h
this. You may be wrong.
e
If your DIP package is capable of
producing Postscript output — in other
words you have Pro Page or
Pagestream2 — you are, as they say, in
business.
Postscript is a language. Unlike C,
For those of you who asked, here is a
brief glimpse of those wonderful
scalable fonts from Gold Disks Outline
Fonts package.
Not only are they are a useful
addition to Pagesetterli. Pro Page or
Prodraw, but they even come with a
nice conversion program that will turn
them into a bitmap font (as used by
almost every art package going and a
Gold D isk Pa ge Se lie r I I 0 1 1 8 9 Docume nt. U ntitle d = L o a
, • I
ar e Gothic book ABCDEFghijk
Bookman Demi AB CD E Fghl jk
of Courier Bold CDEFghijmn
a spot of Courier Bold Obli
S popular A 13(DEFghijidmix)pqrs
Medium I alk ABODEFshilkirrtn
et Triumvirate Condensed ABCefghij1234
ts *00****c--,/s/x3C)ClUCJOV•ii
Pascal, BASIC and Swahili it is
dedicated to the description of shapes.
All the nice curves of your 72 point
fonts, all the precise and functional
beauty of your keylines are just a few
sentences in Postscript.
The advantage of Postscript is that
because it describes the shapes rather
than the individual blocks that make up
the shapes, there is much less to it, and
yet it is more powerful.
For example. the German word
Manuskripteinsendung (literally
translated "manuscript in sending") is
precise but not as easy to say, write or
print as the English equivalent
'submission". Each item of a postscript
file is likewise the equivalent of
countless bits of data in a bitmap. The
information density is greater. This
means the files are smaller, print faster
and are unlikely to give your output
device headaches.
Of course your output device is
consequently going to cost twice as
good number of word-pros) at virtually
any point size.
The range includes additional variants
to the ones included with the Gold Disk
packages and lots of others besides like
Avant Garde, Bookman. Century
Schoolbook, Courier, Palacio, Zapf
Chancery and the incredibly useful
Symbol and Zapf Chancery fonts.
A sample collection is reproduced
41
-1
C3
-
much to do the same job.
Sc the alternative to taking out a
mortgage on your immediate family to
pay for such a device is to use
someone else's. Cunning eh? This is
where the most important feature of
Postscript comes in — it is a universally
recognised language — PCs can speak
it, Macs can speak it — it's like
Esperanto, only it works.
Since most of the backward thinking
outdated publishing in this country is
done on either PCs or Macs using
Postscript devices there is wide support
for this format. Unfortunately at the
moment you are unlikely to find a DTP
bureau that will handle Amiga disks —
most of these silly people haven't even
heard of Amigas!
Obviously a high degree of cunning is
called for. You have to fool these people
into thinking they are dealing with an
ordinary PC or Mac file. The best way to
do this is to select an IBM format
output, and print your document to disk
here for your entertainment. I'd like to
point out that this output — from a
Panasonic KX-P4420 under HP
Laserjet emulation — has obviously
been optically scanned, which will
undoubtedly introduce some distortion.
The illustration should be taken as a
guide to the style and only loosely as
an indication of the quality of output
possible.
ThisisAvantGardeGothicbook ABCDEFghijkp1231"SS8(
and this is ITC Bookman Demi ABCDEFghtildmp123+here
is b i t of Courier Bold CDEFghijmno231f$Ec
followed by a spot of Courier Bold Oblique ABcd
Palacio is always popular ABCDEFghijklnmopqrs
-As
is Zapf Chancery Medium Italic ABODEFghif11lmnop1234561".a&
123ra% Don't forget you get Triumvirate Condensed ABCefghij1234rEolo&
And Zapf Dingbats 1:100**ttoivecolt/X3I/CILILIOV•
0 126 AMINGA COMPUTING November 1990
:-9
You can
convert
the font
to a
bitmap
for
Inclusion
Into a
paint
program
such as
DPaint
Here are
the Outline
fonts, as
produced
by a
Panasonic
laser
printer