Publish It! Easy v3.02 - Timeworks International - Software Review - one of five evaluations of eight midrange desktop publishing software packages in "Desktop Publishing for Everyone" - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, July, 1994 by William Harrel

For the novice, the most exciting aspect is AutoCreate. Similar to Microsoft Publisher's Wizards, AutoCreate builds a layout (newsletter, brochure, flier, and so forth) according to your specifications, prompting you for such information as document size, number of columns, and several other crucial settings. You can even fill in headlines, headers and footers, and captions during the AutoCreate process, and they'll be placed automatically.

Among the options offered in the program is limited control over the way photos print, such as the ability to adjust contrast and brightness.

HomePublisher also supports spot-color separations and other features that make reproducing two- and three-color documents at your local print shop easier. You'll have to pick spot colors from a swatch book, however, which still leaves much of the color-matching process to chance (the same is true of Publish It! Easy). But you can use the color palette to display objects (such as the table of contents box in our newsletter) on separate color plates onscreen, which is a great way to make sure your separation is color correct--before you print.

Although HomePublisher did little to alleviate the memory crunch created by our graphics-intensive newsletter, it warned us before memory ran out. That gave us the chance to save our work and increase the memory allocation in Get Info before the system locked up.

We were disappointed by the shoddy set of import filters. None are provided for the most recent upgrades of Word for the Mac or WordPerfect for the Mac, or compressed TIFF file formats. And you can't use any text or graphics created on a PC without first converting to a Mac word processor or graphic format. Also, the program did not maintain some of the special formatting from the Word for the Mac word processing file, such as superscripts and certain special characters.

Of special note are utilities, called Additions, for making drop caps, automatically aligning objects, and creating column jump lines that help automate the DTP process. A nifty Posted Notes option lets you attach notes to yourself about the layout; it's a great way to keep track of all the elements in a complicated project. This was also the only product that lets you anchor graphics to the text.

For the nonprofessional who needs simple and quick newsletters, brochures, and other short documents on a modestly equipped Mac, give this program serious consideration.

Rating: *** 1/2

MAC

Publish It! Easy provides all the tools that nonprofessionals need for almost any DTP project--and then some. You get strong DTP features, such as spot-color separations and limited image control, in addition to draw and paint modules, a utility for turning your publication into a screen show presentation, and a bunch of special text effects, including drop shadows.

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You lay out columns over an adjustable grid that makes it easy to align objects. If you aren't comfortable aligning visually, the Align command precisely places objects for you. The Lock command rivets them so that they cannot be accidentally moved.

Most functions are performed from the program's context-sensitive Library palette: Applying styles, changing font formats, and other options are accomplished with a mouse click.

Unfortunately, Publish It! Easy let us work ourselves out of allocated memory and then crashed or refused to save the document. Many of the advanced formatting options, such as creating tabbed leaders, placing tabs in styles, and adjusting the text wrap standoff bounding box, were not readily obvious, requiring rummaging through the manual or calls to technical support. Numerous templates are included, but unfortunately the Open dialog box has no preview option.

Snappy performance is a plus for Publish It! Easy--no matter how many graphics and photographs each newsletter page contained, screen redraw was nearly instantaneous.

This program compares favorably with HomePublisher in many ways, but it lacks HomePublisher's AutoCreate feature, an easy way for laypeople to get started. For the gain in power, you'll sacrifice some ease of use. And you'll pay a little more--about $80 on the street.

RELATED ARTICLE: PagePlus 3.0: One Step Beyond

Serif's $60 PagePlus has always been one step ahead of other nonprofessional packages in its inclusion of high-end features. For instance, version 1.0 was the first to offer spot-color separations and fancy text manipulation. Version 2.0 is still the only inexpensive package to provide four-color process separations.

Version 3.0, which we saw in a pre-release version that should be shipping by the time you read this, again takes aim directly at the high-end products, by including a PageMaker-like story editor, improved typography in the form of automatic pair kerning, and an open architecture that supports third-party plug-ins and direct scanning into the application. It also offers improved high-end color reproduction.

Version 2.0 lacked automatic pagenumbering and a facing-pages view; these are fixed in the new version. With the upgrade, beginners also benefit from such features as event-driven hints and tips, multimedia demos, layout checking, and links to pertinent help topics in all dialog boxes. These are options currently available only in Microsoft Publisher and should make PagePlus simple to learn and use. An innovative ease-of-use option lets you customize the interface to three levels of difficulty: Intro, Publisher, and Professional. Serif, (800) 697-3743.