Publish It!, a new page-layout program that includes tools for word processing, drawing, and painting, is aimed at users who've been left behind by the giants, such as PageMaker. And it’s almost a bull's-eye: Publish It! is fast, opens multiple documents simultaneously, and even runs on a 512KE with one floppy-disk drive.
WHAT IT IS Publish It! uses a frame metaphor similar to Ready,Set,Go!'s and includes several features not found in most high-end packages. For example, it rotates text in 1-degree increments, performs vertical justification of text, and creates patterned and toned type in 1-percent increments. The program comes with more than 70 well-designed layout templates and fine documentation. The Quick-Start Mini-Manual helps amateurs produce professional-looking results in short order.
Text and graphics are contained in frames. You can draw text frames or have Publish It! put them onto the page to your specification. A linking tool enables text to flow from one column to the next automatically. Frames created on one page can be replicated either on the next page or on all subsequent pages in a document. However, you cannot specify a range of pages for the replication, nor can you have Publish It! automatically link the text frames.
Page magnifications from 12 to 800 percent are available, in single-page, facing-page, and editable thumbnail views. There's also a Scratch Page option — analogous to PageMaker's pasteboard — where you can store elements or move them between pages. In any view, you can select multiple objects and then move, scale, or rotate them as a group.
Publish It! uses three master pages for repeating elements—one for left-hand pages, one for right-hand pages, and one for both sides of a page. You can create V-shaped, pyramid, or slanted margins, and you can make text flow around or inside irregularly shaped graphics. Type sizes, kerning, and leading (automatic or manual) can be selected in .004-point increments. You can stretch or condense text, shift the baseline, and print pages with binding, gutters.
Publish It! has a speedy built-in word processor, and it imports documents created in MacWrite (but not MacWrite II), Word (version 3.0 family), Works 1.1, WordPerfect, and WriteNow as well as ASCII text files. The tabs (left, right, center, and decimal) support selectable leaders (dots, dashes, and underscores), and the program has a 160,000-word spelling checker and a 240,000-word thesaurus. The spelling checker works interactively or in Batch mode and has a customizable user dictionary. The Find & Replace dialog box lets you change type sizes, styles, patterns, and tones in addition to text strings; it works on either a single story or all stories in a document.
The Font Substitution command lets you make document wide font changes.
HOW IT WORKS In spite of its good features, Publish It! does have some serious limitations: You can export text only via the Clipboard, it doesn't support style sheets (although Paragraph Tags provide some formatting capabilities), and the Undo command doesn't work for most text operations. (Version 1.2, which is due out by the end of 1989, will offer automatic creation and linking of text frames, improved text-export capabilities, a Word 4.0 filter, and an enhanced Undo command.)
Publish It! also has paint and draw tools that let you create and edit bit-mapped and object-oriented graphics, including high-resolution TIFF images. Importing an image automatically places it on-screen in a frame, ready for sizing, cropping, or editing. To create a bit map within Publish It!, you must draw a bit-map frame within which the paint tools can work, which is similar to working with Canvas. You can also make any object or text merge into an underlying bit map for dot-by-dot editing. Publish It! creates hairlines and thin lines and has a palette of other line thicknesses, but you can't specify thickness by points.
Color is Publish It!'s weakest point. It can import color PICT2 images, but it doesn't support any other color or gray-scale graphics. To simulate grays, you can import 1-bit TIFF half tones. Any frame can be assigned one of eight colors, and spot color separations can be printed. Color applies to everything within a frame, so you can't assign a different color to a few words within a text frame. Publish It! doesn't assign gray-scale values to different colors, so black type on a solid-color background appears as black on black if your screen is monochrome or if you print a composite proof on a black-and-white printer.
A few other areas also need improvement. The program has many hierarchical menus, which are difficult to traverse, and more keyboard equivalents would be helpful. Rotated text should display that way onscreen. Rulers should show the outer dimensions of an object for dragging, not just the current cursor position. The Object Specifications dialog box rounds all entries to two decimal places, which is not accurate for eighths (.125) or sixteenths (.0625) of an inch. The Duplicate command, which places an additional copy of any selected object(s) on-screen, should permit specification of multiple copies and their positions relative to each other. I've also encountered some erratic problems in printing documents with complex PICT graphics.
Overall, however, I find Publish It! impressive. It provides more of the tools I need regularly than do PageMaker or Ready,Set,Go!, it's easier to use than QuarkXPress, and it's fast. It's not designed for sophisticated color work, but anyone doing basic publishing in black-and-white or with spot color (especially on a 1-megabyte Mac) will find it efficient and capable.
Lewis, Darryl. (December 1989). Publish It! MacUser. (pgs. 60-61).
TimeWorks
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
5 / 
2020-09-13 / 
c08af8a5bc93d9d9c390a23b2fc51c54496c3cb2 / 
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Publish-It_1.2.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
