There’s nothing like an attractively designed, personalized certificate to jazz up an office or make someone’s day. Top Honors from Springboard Software was created to produce simple certificates quickly and easily and to take advantage of high-quality EPS graphics and downloadable PostScript fonts.
Easy Does It
Top Honors comes with two certificate templates, three files of graphics, borders and seals, plus a special decorative font, Old German, that you can use to make ornate certificates.
To create a certificate, you simply choose New Certificate from the File menu and choose portrait or landscape orientation from the Certificate Format dialog box. You then see a blank certificate on screen that consists of border, title, body, signature, date, and graphic areas. Each of these elements — except, of course, the border — is an independent element that you can move; but the certificate template actually lets you producea professional-looking certificate on the first try.
To enter text to the title, body, signature, or date sections of a certificate, you double-click on one of those sections; this brings up a dialog box specific to that part of the form. For the title, for instance, you see a series of blank lines and three formatting options: lines of parallel text; one curved, centered line of text over two straight lines; or curved lines bracketing one line of straight text. You have access to any downloadable PostScript font resident in your connected laser printer (provided that font is no larger than 50K). If you don’t have a laser printer connected, you have access to Courier, Helvetica, and Times-Roman.
To add a border pattern, you double-click on the border area of the template and select one of the 24 patterns that come with the program. These patterns range from ornate roses to spare Art Nouveau curlicues and should offer something for everyone.
You’re limited, however, to the use of only three graphics: one seal, one EPS graphic, and one MacPaint-format graphic. To add the first of these, you can double-click on the graphic area at the lower right of the certificate template, which opens the graphics dialog box. There you can either select one of the ten EPS graphics that come with the product (ranging from hooks to cresLs, charts, crosses, eagles, and tnher emblematic artwork), choose one of the seven seals also included with the product, or import an EPS or MacPaint file of your own.
To add the remaining two graphics you choose Add Graphic from the Graphics menu. If you choose to import a MacPaint graphic you can use the grabber hand, the marquee, or the lasso tools in the Add Graphic dialog box to select only that part of the graphic that you want to import. For a really fancy effect, you can even set the gray scale of the EPS graphic you’re using, so that it looks like a watermark in the certificate’s background.
To each of the supplied seals you can add two lines of your own curved text, although you’re limited to 33 characters on each line.
Wild Cards
To print a set of certificates, you can use Top Honor’s wild-card feature. Instead of entering an individual’s name in the body of the certificate, type name to indicate that you’ll he working from a list. Then select Create Name List from the File Menu, and enter the list of names. When you print out a certificate with the name in it, the program prompts you to select a list of names and asks you to select individuals on that list or Select All.
One problem I had was that the program doesn’t allow access to screen fonts installed via a resource manager such as Suitcase or MasterJuggler. And I had trouble printing certificates when Suitcase was installed. I had some problems getting my initial certificates to print, but I received good technical support from Springboard Software.
For a simple, easy-to-use certificate maker that takes advantage of PostScript-quality graphics and text, I give Top Honors, well, top honors.
Ferino, Chris. (March 1990). Top Honors 1.02. Macworld. (pg 189).
Springboard Software
Applications
out of 10 (1 vote)
11 / 
2015-08-13 / 
fdfddc4c7d0b493363fb64fc95a049f8b71dfca1 / 
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tophonors_dsk.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
