 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group RSG Starts The DTP Race Once More Gordon Woolf |
Gordon Woolf reviews a DTP program which wasn’t in his list of “DTP contenders” in PCUpdate, October 2001. It wasn’t there because it wasn’t on the market for the PC — yet it has been around for 20 years!
Way back in July 1986 when a magazine called Desktop Publishing hit the newsstands in Australia, there were two programs considered worthy of serious consideration for producing publications - PageMaker, and ReadySetGo.
Both were only available for the Mac, and ReadySetGo was the better seller. In his review Tony Webster went to some lengths to describe the way in which type and pictures were placed on the page by first drawing text or picture "blocks". Now, even PageMaker offers the near universal method of creating frames; it is just that ReadySetGo was the first.
It was to be a year before a program called QuarkXPress hit the market, seriously hurting PageMaker (which had found a new market among PC users), but really clobbering the Mac-only ReadySetGo. QuarkXPress could handle colour! To add perspective, these were the days not only BQ, before Quark, but even before Illustrator. Ventura was expected shortly, using the GEM operating system on the IBM AT.
Why worry PC users about such an ancient Mac program? There is a reason - after 15 years, the total lifetime of "desktop publishing", ReadySetGo has yet again changed owners, and as Ready,Set,Go! is available in version one for the PC.
There's also a drop in price. Back on 1986 it cost $269 in Australia, compared to PageMaker at $895, but now it can be bought on line for US$99 (a little under A$200).
Dirwan Ltd in the UK may be the new owners but they have been involved with the development of RSG since its earliest days - long before RSG was acquired by Letraset as part of that company's efforts to have a life after dry transfer lettering.
I've been playing with the 14-day 9 MB demo and I am impressed. For anyone on a strict budget, this is well worth a trial.
Even in its earliest days, RSG was able to place objects with mathematical precision, and that continues with a "Block specification" palette for placement and sizing to a hundredth of a pica or centimetre or a ten-thousandth of an inch (the default measurement).
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You can open multiple files, and you can also open several copies of the
same file. Once the original copy is altered you can only do a "Save As" if you wish to change the document
from the other view, so one copy only should be worked on with the others regarded as view-only copies.
You can create RSG files from RTF files, so it would be fairly easy to convert a Word document and even to
get at a Microsoft Publisher file by saving that as RTF.
There are "style sheets" which are individual styles as used in Word or PageMaker but these styles are rigid
in that to modify an individual instance you have to remove the application of the style sheet so that
paragraph. This may take a little getting used to - change a single crosshead by a point or two to make it
fit and that crosshead will not be changed if you later change the overall crosshead style from Times to
Arial.
The program can handle quite advanced print output, including separations, and the printing of individual
separations. Spot colours are also simple, once one realises that all colours are defined as Process by
default, and that one needs to double click a colour and define it as a Spot colour for it to appear in the
separations dialog.
No doubt this is one of a number of "gotchas" that come with any program that helped set the standards. What
is amazing is that it set the ways so many things are done, and so it will seem remarkably familiar.
Those who have experienced asking a bureau if they can handle a Microsoft Publisher file may also be in for
a new experience. I'd expect it to be on the lines of "Is that still around?" Tell them you can write to a
postscript file and bureau oldies will surely say: "Yes, we'll give it a go".
Exporting to HTML was also interesting. Page layout programs are notorious for creating poor approximations
of the print page and/or excessively bloated code. RSG produced just a straight-down-the-page translation,
but it did so with a small and readily editable file. I'd give it five out of ten in an area where I'd score
most with three or less.
And here's one to ask other layout program users: Can your program automatically insert the page number of
the next or previous text block whatever page that is on? RSG can. On page 1, enter "continued on page 2",
then move the continued block to page 3, and back on page one the reference will be to page 3.
For more information see http://www.diwan.com/.
Reprinted from the March 2002 issue of PC Update, the
magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
