For gourmet-style page design at blue-plate-speeial prices, nothing beats Timeworks' Publish It! Easy, Although you won't find high-end color-processing tools in this 5249.95 package. Publish It! Easy combines word-processing, graphics, page-layout, and presentation capabilities in one package.
Publish It! Easy 2.01 shows improvement to an already solid product. Timeworks has made the program faster and easier to use by automating routine procedures, and it's even added tools for creating slide presentations. Improved color support and the elimination of some minor quirks completes the list of enhancements in the latest version.
Experienced users of Publish It! Easy are familiar with the program's library palette, which displays hierarchical menu choices (such as fonts, sizes, styles, and alignments) without making you hold down the mouse button. This lets you use the mouse to select text or objects or try out different choices on the library palette.
Version 2.01's library palette gives users the flexibility to change the number of linked text frames on a page. The text reflows automatically, so you can try several layouts before deciding which one to save. The library palette also contains commands that automatically create text boxes for headlines and subheads, control paragraph indents, and specify vertical justification.
Version 2.01 supports gray-scale TIFF files. Although color support is still limited to eight spot colors, you can now select colors from Apple's Color Picker. You can also assign different colors to individual characters or words in a text frame. Publish It! Easy 2.01 doesn't produce knockouts when you print spot-color separations, however, nor does it support process-color separations or Pantone matching.
To produce a slide presentation with Publish It! Easy, you create a publication in which each page corresponds to one slide. Excellent text and graphics hand1ing, combined with built-in painting and drawing tools, make it simple to produce effective slide shows with standard DTP techniques. There are 49 special effects that take you from one slide to the next.
Timeworks has eliminated some of the annoyances of previous versions. The custom tabs now work reliably, but they need more attention. Although tabbed text printed perfectly in my tests, it still looked out of alignment on-screen. Previous incompatibilities with SuperLaserSpool, SuperMac's popular print spooler, have been eliminated, and you can now add words to the spelling checker's dictionary.
If you don't need process-color separations, Pantone matching, or more than eight spot colors, look no further than Publish It! Easy 2.01.
Lewis, Darryl. (May 1991). Publish It! Easy. MacUser. (pg. 77).