So you want to be a publisher? BookMaker's ClickBook might take you one step closer to your Rupert Murdoch fantasies. ClickBook is a print utility that helps you format documents into double-sided booklet form, and automates the rather arcane process of pagination. The program comes with 20 preconfigured booklet types and allows you to create more layouts as you need them. The layout tools aren’t fancy, but then again, ClickBook isn’t aiming to be QuarkXPress.
Greating a booklet in ClickBook is easy. First you open a document (in almost any text or graphics application) and choose Page Setup from the File menu; then you check a box to make GlickBook active. Finally, you print the document using the standard Macintosh print command.
Instead of sending the pages to the printer, ClickBook captures them in a buffer and then allows you to select a booklet type. The program arranges the document pages so that they are printed in a smaller format, and they come out of your printer as page signatures: single sheets with multiple minipages printed on them.
While ClickBook makes it easy to print your documents as minipages, you’ll need to practice a little to get those pages to look right. Some of the layouts reduce the page size and the margins quite a bit — enough so that you will need to use a fairly large type size for it to still be legible after being reduced. You’ll also need to experiment with the margins to get the pages to print correctly.
Once you have the printed pages in hand, the next step is to assemble them. An option lets you print straightforward assembly instructions with your booklet, but adding page numbers to your document in the original application makes booklet construction a lot simpler.
ClickBook booklets are no substitute for professionally printed books, manuals, or brochures. ClickBook doesn’t use a page-description language such as PostScript to preserve letters and graphics. When it scales pages down, there can be a slight loss in image quality; gradients and gray-scale drawings suffer the greatest degradation.
To reduce the distortion that scaling causes, ClickBook has options that let you preserve graphic and text shapes. You can also choose a no-scaling option and do the necessary scaling manually in the document’s original application.
The Last Word Overall, most people will be satisfied with the quality of ClickBook's booklets. With just a little practice, I created address books, shareware manuals, and minibooks of poetry of variable length using such applications as Microsoft Word, No Hands Software’s Common Ground, and QuarkXPress. For small businesses or individuals who need to create inexpensive booklets quickly and without hassle, ClickBook is an excellent choice.
Hawn, Matthew. (November 1994). ClickBook 1.1. Macworld. (pg. 70).