[3161] in TECHWR-L
Experience with Publish It??
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven Owens)
Thu Nov 11 15:02:47 1993
Date: Thu, 11 Nov 1993 13:31:16 -0600
Reply-To: "Technical Writers List; for all Technical Communication issues" <TECHWR-L%OSUVM1.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu>
From: Steven Owens <uso01@MAILHOST.UNIDATA.COM>
To: Multiple recipients of list TECHWR-L <TECHWR-L%OSUVM1.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: Kirstin Mathers's message of Wed,
I set up and ran the desktop publishing for a small local weekly for a month
using Publish It. My primary advice is, don't ever use it on an XT :-)
More to the point, which version, how recent, and what's the price they're
asking? Also, what hardware are you planning to run it on?
I seem to recall that Publish It used fixed-size fonts, i.e. fonts in
the original sense of the word. This severely limited my ability to
adjust the size for the font as appropriate. Also, the drawing tools
weren't the best in the world (or even half-best).
Take all of this with a caveat, it's been about 2 years since I worked
with Publish It, and that may have been an older version. So by now
they may have greatly improved it; or not.
I'd suggest you take a look at EnVision Publisher, a decent little shareware
package for MSDOS. You can get it from any simtel20 mirror site. Offhand
I'd say try gatekeeper.com or wuarchive.wustl.edu, or ftp.cs.ubc.ca. Find
the mirror directory and then the msdos directory, and look for these two
files:
msdos/deskpub/evp10a.zip
msdos/deskpub/evp10b.zip
I've only played around with it a bit, but it looks like a very slick and
professional package. The shareware registration is $69. I don't do any
at-home publishing now, but if I start to, I'll probably use EnVision.
Steven J. Owens
uso01@unidata.com
