Fly Out Tools

Tools have now been grouped together in "popup" like icon list that let you switch between tools quickly. This gave us the "screen space" we needed to give you more tools. Also, by grouping them together it does so in a way that makes it easier to use.

The new tools are:

Rotation Tool

This new tool is now grouped with Object Tool, Reshape Tool, and the Crop tool. What does it do? It lets you finally set the rotation point of object(s), and if you grab and object you can rotate it right on screen! You can also slant/twist with keyboard qualifiers!

1,2,&3 Column Tool

Now you can switch between the 3 most common column counts in a text frame without changing your prefs.

Scallop, Bevel, Insert Box Tool

The rounded corner box and these are now grouped with the box tool. Pick a corner type from the toolbox and draw away.

Star, Wavy, Scallop, Puffy Polygon Tool

Like the above two, you can quickly switch between drawing these polygon types without changing your prefs between them or drawing it as one type and changing it to another. In the future we hope to add a few more useful polygon types such as gears.

Grid Tool

Yea, it was in a 3.2a beta for awhile, but there was no room for it and borders. While you could always get to it via macros or the configurable toolbar in 3.2, now its always there and "official". In the future we will group some other object types with this as a sort of Misc group.

Note Tool

Creates a yellow text frame with a dashed outline that is non-printing. Use this to write notes in the document to remind you of things to do, or locations of graphics or even special printing requirements.

Define Font Substitution

Big time feature! Load and old document and it uses a font you don't have? Transfering documents from other platforms? Any font that is not installed on your machine that is used in a document will be displayed in a list where you can select a replacement font. That replacement can be for display only, or a permanent change to the document. Entries in the font substitution list can be local to the document, or made part of the global font substitution table.

HTML Help

Now we can have the same help files between Mac and Amiga. Also, we can supply our help files with more content like we used to do, and better yet provide pictures where it helps. In the future, we hope to add interactive help.

Improved Adobe Illustrator Import/Export filter

The current Illustrator filter leaves much to be desired. Now you can export to Illustrator and expect it to keep as much as possible when importing into another application that supports Illustrator files.

RTF Text Export

Now you can exchange files with WordPerfect PC or Microsoft Word with most of the formatting intact.

2.2 Style Place Graphics

With the changes necessary for Font Subsitition, it makes it easier for us to return the old favorite 2.2 style placing of graphics. While you can configure PageStream to still place graphics automatically in the center of the screen like it works now in PageStream3.2, if you want you can set it to allow direct placing and scaling of the graphics before it is placed on the page. For those not familiar with PageStream2, after the graphic is imported, you get a paste mouse cursor. When you click on the page it places the upper left hand corner of the graphic where you clicked. If you click and drag the mouse, you actually define the "frame" that the graphic is scaled to fit into.

Automatic Text Frame "Like" Toggle

When you import text with Auto Text Frames on, any overflow text will be placed into columns created on blank pages. Before, it always created them the same as the Masterpage margins/column count & gutter specified. Now you can also choose to have the new columns created with the same coordinates, count and gutter (and even the same color!) as the last column in the article.

PostScript Style Dash Line

You can still define line dash styles using the old familiar bitmap on/off mannor, but you can now also describe the individual dash lengths as you do in PostScript and applications such as Adobe Illustrator and ProDraw.

Set Type Language Submenu

Installed languages are now in a submenu in the Type menu. Select one of these and you page numbers, dates, times and hyphenation will change to reflect that language if you didn't specify it in the afore mentioned attributes.

DPI Calculator

A little script for those DPI impared users! Basically, you type in the x/ydpi that you want the selected picture scaled to and it does the calculation and scales the picture for you.

Improved Color Palette

Tint: Set the percentage tint for the color directly from the palette.

From/To Color: Gradient to colors can now be set directly from the palette.

Swatches: Small swatches in the color palette now let you identify what the color looks like.

Note:

For users with low color depth this function is pretty worthless. Unless you in at least 32 colors, and hopefully 256 or 24bit, forget it!

Auto Page Orientation

Yea! Now you can mix landscape/portrait in a single document and print at once. Better yet, stop changing your printer prefs everytime you print a landscape document. Let PageStream do the work.

Drag Duplicate

When your moving a object(s) with the Object Tool, or rotating them with the Rotate Tool, hold down the Alt (or Option) key and when you let go of the mouse button your original object will still be in the same place, but a duplicate will be placed in the new location.

Tab/Shift-Tab cycle through objects

Pressing Tab/Shift-Tab cycles through the objects on the current page.

New toolbar buttons for view pictures/drawings/column outline/text framelinks/invisibles

Turn pictures on and off with ease again!

Chapters can now be moved into and out of parent chapters

If you change the structure of your document you don't have to start over now. Add and remove chapter levels on the go.

Pages can be moved from a document to a new chapter

Create a document and decide you need chapters? No problem now.

Set screen frequency/angle/spot function for Halftone dither to non-PostScript printers

Thats right, now non-PostScript users can set all this (and more). 10dpi line spot functions for those special effects, or set the freq/angle for each ink on your color printer to finally get the best color you can.

** Flash ** Now you can also set a gamma for each ink and UCR/GCR for the RGB to CYMK conversion. Set them in the XPD pref file or just "customize" it in the print setup requester.

Improved Ordered and FS dither options to provide a better range of grays to high res printers.

Now the Ordered and FS dithers use a bigger cellsize when you print at higher resolutions. What does this mean? Less banding on your gradients and more recognizable shades of gray/color

Mirror, Negative, Thumbnail, Crop & Reg marks, and color seps to non-PostScript

I can't say that I agree with the use of several of these, but you wanted it, so you got it! At least thumbnails is _very_ nice!

Colorize B&W or Grayscale pictures.

Print them on a specific spot plate. Scan a black and white logo and change it to a spot color if you want! Make it red! It will print that way, and if its a spot color it will print on that spot plate!

Load/Save printer prefs

Switch between printers quickly. Just load/save miniprefs from the printer pref folder. Now you can switch between your color inkjet, black and white laser, and setup for printing to disk for an imagesetter without looking for those scraps of paper with the right settings for each.

Preview color seps on screen

Just shift-select the name of the view in the hide or show submenus in the window menu and now you can not only rename the view like before, but you can also show the color plates one at a time to make sure you have right spot colors or overprint/knockout options set!

External pictures FPOs are now saved with the document

When you load a document you don't have to wait to display those external pictures while it rebuilds the FPO!

Easier reselection of moved external pictures

If you ever reorganized your external pictures, you know what a pain it is to tell PageStream where those 50 pictures went. Now, it remembers where you helped it find each "lost" graphic and looks there for others before asking you where they went!

Unsupported accent characters get displayed as unaccented

Not every font supports every accented character. Now if it can't find the accented character it will use the unaccented character.

Total object count shown in Report...

Get a general idea how your document is shaping up.

Insert Character Requestor

When defining Bullet character; and Tab fill and align on character, select from a list using a requester similar to the insert character\ requester, say goodbye to typing strange unicode characters to access characters not found in the standard system fonts but that are handled by PageStream and its font engines.

Configurable Paper and DPI list in new ILBM XPD file Amiga Only

Now you can set configure the ILBM printer driver for any DPI or paper size you want.

HP driver now supports user editable XPD file Amiga Only

Add new resolutions or tweak defaults without waiting for an update from us.