On confronting DesignStudio, one's first impression is that Letraset has simply beefed up Ready,Set,Go! (RSG) and upped the price. However, DesignStudio adds new and welcome tools for layout management and for handling text, graphics, and color. It's a world beyond RSG, which Letraset still sells and supports. Unfortunately, DesignStudio is also slow, has WYSIWYG limitations, and has too rigid an interface.
LAYOUT TOOLS Instead of the red angular grid RSG uses, DesignStudio offers an optional column-guide mode that lets vou work in a more-traditional-looking layout environment. Column guides can be set up and altered only on the left and right master pages. Other guides, vertical and horizontal, can be pulled from the rulers and affect only the current page. Surrounding the printable page zone is a pasteboard area that holds extra layout elements from all pages. You can group and ungroup elements, move them forward or backward in the overall stack, and lock them into place — with a nonintuitive Command-U.
Text or picture blocks can be 1 of 16 shapes, including ovals, triangles, and parallelograms that can be resized — even disproportionally — but not reshaped using vertices, the way polygons can be.
You can freely position an object; have it snap to guides; nudge it with the arrow keys; and specify its exact location, size, rotation, and a host of other attributes in the Specifications dialog box — a level of precision comparable to that of QuarkXPress. Undoing the manual resizing of a picture frame and its contents, however, returns only the frame to its original size — the contents remain scaled!
DesignStudio offers free rotation of any element or group around any center in .1-degree steps — at a price. First, you can't undo a rotation except in a dialog box. Once you have rotated or flipped an element, it breaks up onscreen and you lose substantial editing freedom: You can crop or scale it only by using the Object Specifications dialog box and typing in a new size or scaling factor. A rotated polygon can't be reshaped until it's rotated back to zero degrees.
If you place a PICT2 drawing that contains text, such as a map or a chart, and then rotate it, the text prints smoothly. But if you opt to print PICT2 colors as grays, as you might with a LaserWriter, the embedded text prints as it appears onscreen: as a coarse bit map.
Rotated text blocks also have their surprises. To edit rotated text, DesignStudio temporarily sets it back to zero degrees and removes any special vertical justification until you finish editing. This makes fine write-to-fit tweaks difficult.
One result of all the rotations, unrotations, and other updates is complete, slow screen redraws. DesignStudio redraws the screen even if you have changed only a small element or answered a dialog box.
As a shortcut, you can use glossaries to save both graphics and text items for reuse. Once you've stored a glossary item, you can insert it into the layout by using a preassigned keystroke or by selecting its name from a scrolling list.
WORKING WITH TEXT Text can be either typed in directly or imported. Microsoft Word 1.05, 3.01, and 4.0; Microsoft Works 2.0; WordPerfect 1.0.1; WriteNow 2.0; MacWrite; and MacWrite II, as well as tagged text (with formatting codes) and plain-text tiles, are supported. Multiple foreign languages are supported in a single layout, and DesignStudio applies the appropriate spelling dictionaries and hyphenation rules to each. The built-in spelling checker is workable but clunky.
To set text attributes, you go to the Format menu (not the Text menu). You can set attributes such as font, style, and size individually or simultaneously by using the Type Specs dialog box. But all your changes are for naught if you don't first remove any named style that may be in effect. You do that on the Edit menu (where else?). Styles, however, are defined and edited on the Document menu.
To create a style sheet, you use essentially the same dialog box that's used for Type Specs, but you name the collection of attributes. Unfortunately, you can't base one style on another or designate that one style will always follow another. You can, however, create a style with the collective attributes of a selected chunk of text or copy the style of one block and apply it to another block. Styles can even apply to individual characters, and multiple styles can be cumulatively applied to selected text.
Text can wrap around a graphic or other text, with the option of suppressing wrapping altogether for individual items. There is no provision for a custom-shaped wrapping border. DesignStudio supports several kinds of vertical text justification: flush with the top or bottom of the text block, centered within it, filling the block by spreading lines evenly and adding space only between paragraphs.
WORKING WITH GRAPHICS DesignStudio includes a polygon/polyline tool, with polygon editing that works like that in MacDraw II. The full range of Pantone colors is supported, as are custom colors using the RGB (red, green, blue), HSV (hue, saturation, value), or CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) models.
DesignSiudio imports monochrome and full-color graphics in the TIFF, RIFF, EPSF, PICT, PICT2, and MacPaint formats. You can tweak a gray-scale TIFF or RIFF picture in the Image Control dialog box, which can modify screen frequency and angle, contrast, and brightness, and which allows use of a gamma curve for fine gray-value control.
Unassisted, DesignSiudio produces only spot-color separations. You can, however, make four-color separations by using StudioLink, an interface to a high-end Crosfield system. A $395 separation utility, DesignStudio Separator — which should be available by the time you read this — should address most other needs for separations on PostScript imagesetters from Linotype, Optronics, Agfa Compugraphic, and others. It will be able to color-separate native elements as well as TIFF, EPSF, and PICT2 images.
Annexes are DesignStudio’s version of plug-in tools. You put them into a special folder, and their capabilities appear in menus and dialog boxes. Five annexes ship with version 1.0: Auto Kern Specs, Auto Track Specs, Fonts Used, Pictures Used, and Strip Fonts.
THE BOTTOM LINE DesignSiudio offers features that make page layout more self-contained. If you're a Ready,Set,Go! user who’s ready to move up, do it.
The manual needs work; it’s condescending, repeats itself excessively, and references other sections far more often than necessary.
DesignStudio needs to make its layout process faster and less bound by its interface roles and inconvenient prerequisites. If you're still shopping for a dream layout package, wait for the new versions of QuarkXPress (see “BetaWatch” in this issue) and PageMaker before making your decision.
Parascandolo, Salvatore. (June 1990). DesignStudio. MacUser. (pgs. 68-70).
Letraset Pendaflex Corporation
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DesignStud20.hqx
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
