Longtime Persuasion fans should be forgiven for wondering if their favorite program was getting any attention from the folks at Aldus. In the two-and-a-half-year hiatus since Persuasion 2.1 appeared, older competitors like Microsoft’s PowerPoint have gained ground, and new programs like Gold Disk’s Astound — with its emphasis on live presentations and special effects — have entered the scene. In an effort to regain the lead, Aldus has released Persuasion 3.0, a major upgrade that offers users plenty of new features to cheer about, but not without a few disappointments.
The Price of Progress
If you’re thinking about trading up, you may need more than the $150 upgrade fee. A complete installation consumes about 30MB of disk space, increased from 8.5MB. RAM requirements have also ballooned, with an allocation of at least 2.5MB for Persuasion alone. You’ll need even more memory if you want to add tables and charts to your presentations, since those functions are now handled by separate applications, Aldus Chart and Aldus Table. It’s practically impossible to run all three applications at the same time on an 8MB Mac.
Ironically, Aldus has chosen Microsoft’s Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) extensions to let you plant charts and tables in your presentations. To create a graph, for example, you select Persuasion’s chart tool and then click wherever you want the chart to appear on the slide. Aldus Chart launches automatically, giving you access to a surprisingly comprehensive array of charting options, including the familiar pie, bar, line, and scatterplot graph formats. Aldus Chart also gives you extensive interactive control over graphic elements like pie rotation, segmentation, and thickness, although support for shadowed text is notably absent. Aldus Table is less impressive, but it’s a big improvement over Persuasion 2.1’s table tools.
Unfortunately, all this functionality comes at a cost. In addition to the extra memory demands, linking objects into presentations can be frustratingly slow. On my Quadra 650, for example, it took almost ten seconds to transfer from Persuasion to Chart, even with both applications already loaded. On the plus side, though, Aldus’s choice of OLE technology means that you can easily embed documents from other OLE-compliant applications like Microsoft Word and Excel into your presentations.
Familiar Territory
People who are already accustomed to Persuasion will find it easy to work with 3.0, even without reading the well-written manual. (Persuasion also includes a help function that lets you search for topics by keyword. Coverage tends to be scattered, though, forcing you to do a lot of navigating to cover a subject adequately.) Aldus provides 90 days of free support beginning with the first call; my questions were answered promptly and courteously by the tech-support staff.
A welcome change in Persuasion 3.0 is the use of floating palettes to replace the cumbersome hierarchical menus that plagued earlier versions... As much as I like Persuasion’s new interface, though. I’d like to see Aldus add a customizable tool bar and a beefier set of drawing functions (a Bézier-curve tool would be a good addition, for example). Persuasion could also benefit from user-definable keyboard shortcuts.
Persuasion’s new model for handling colors can be a bit confusing. Persuasion ships with six different master color sets, each containing 160 hues. Two other color sets can be customized to meet your needs. From each master set, you choose subsets of 20 shades that form the basic color scheme for your presentation. Once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to change the color of all the titles or other presentation elements with a few mouse-clicks.
Live Video
Aldus has added several new features designed to enhance on-screen presentations. For example, you can designate any text or graphic object as an Autojump location so that the presentation skips to another slide or application when you click on it. Persuasion also includes simple animation tools that let you make objects or text move on or off the screen. Another useful feature called Autolayer automates the time-consuming process of creating a layered presentation, where each line or paragraph on a slide is highlighted in turn.
The player that Aldus bundles with Persuasion lets you distribute your slide shows. The player is more compact (609K versus 2.3MB), uses less memory, and runs slide shows more smoothly than the main application. It also does a good job of matching a presentation’s colors to the display monitor. You can even annotate presentations while they’re running. (Persuasion ships with players for both Macintosh and Widows machines.)
Missing in Action
After such a long wait, I was disappointed that Aldus didn’t remedy some of Persuasion 2.1’s shortcomings. For example, there is still no support for dual (left and right) slide presentations, a common requirement in educational and scientific circles. Persuasion’s rudimentary spelling checker — an important feature when you consider how glaring spelling mistakes can be when projected larger than life — is as frustrating to use as ever. Finally, Persuasion still doesn’t support rotated text, and saving presentations to disk often takes longer than it should.
Despite its problems, though, this new release brings Persuasion back into the presentation software mainstream. If you can spare the disk space and memory, and you don’t mind the delays associated with linking charts and tables into your presentations, then you can consider Persuasion 3.0 a strong contender. It’s also worth considering an upgrade if you’re already using an earlier version.
Tessler, Franklin N. (September 1994). Persuasion 3.0. Macworld. (pg. 65).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
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2015-08-13 / 
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Adobe_Persuasion_3.toast_.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
