Pagesetter
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Bill, I've had PageSetter for awhile now and I think it's VERY good. No
experience with Mac or IBM page-makeup programs so I can't give you any
comparisons. The program will directly import Scribble! and Textcraft
files (and pure ASCII, of course). Pagesetter has a built-in text editor
which is fairly full-featured.
PageSetter uses 640 by 200 graphics mode and can import IFF files. PS
includes a graphic editor where you can modify imported pictures. The
graphics editor is obviously not as powerful as DPaint but is more than
adequate. The program doesn't use color.
As far as output quality goes, it depends on your printer. Dot-matrix will
never be typesetting. I have an Epson JX-80 and it prints the full page.
The Ruby fonts seem to look the best for body copy but I am in the process
of looking for better fonts. The public-domain fonts floating around seem
to be for special effects not letter-quality printing. If you see the
file 28fonts.arc, ignore it- these fonts are buggy and will crash any
program.
The manual is a small booklet which barely goes over the program. This is
a very powerful program and a manual the size of Lotus 123 would barely
cover it (of course, this keeps the cost down). There is only 1 sample
file on disk- they should have included many more.
The program uses a lot of graphics memory and really pushes the 512K chip
limit. If anyone with memory expansion has PageSetter let me know if the
expansion memory helps (since a lot of chip memory is required). PS
discusses this in the manual. Gold Disk mentions a future upgrade with
Postscript support.
If you're looking for something to turn your dot-matrix into a 2500dpi
typesetting machine-this isn't it. It is however, the best program I've
ever seen for the Amiga. George Glines