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Improving GeoPublish (Part One)
by Bruce Thomas

I have said it before and will say it again - the reason I started using GEOS was GeoPublish. This program allows you to use your 64 to publish high-quality printed material and a number of publications, plus many User Group Newsletters, have been the recipients of GeoPublish's power. This power, however, comes with a price which is measured in hours learning the program.

The GeoPublish manual is generally good reading and, with it, you can learn most of what you need to know to use GeoPublish. Still, Berkeley Softworks found it necessary to publish a User Manual Addendum which identifies inaccuracies in the original. If you haven't seen this addendum, which came with the 2-disk 'Publish upgrade, you are missing out on more good info.

The first place to start when learning GeoPublish is the Tutorial in the manual. This tutorial will take you through the creation of a Newsletter and, in the process, you will get practice at importing text files and graphic images. The tutorial does leave a few things out though, and there are better ways to accomplish some others. That is why you need to turn to publications like the Loadstar Letter for hints, tips and a thorough once over like Scott presented in his recent GeoPublish series. I have been using GeoPublish for 9 years and, in this two-part article, I will try to correct a few of the tutorial omissions and pass on a number of tips on ways to get more out of GeoPublish.

Taking a look at the tutorial it becomes obvious that your newsletter won't come out as intended as the manual forgets to tell you to copy the LW-ROMA font to your work disk. You need this font to create the Jelly Roll as described but this shouldn't be your first choice. The LW fonts (there are 11 GEOS LW fonts) provide unparallelled output on a Laser but are less favourable on a Dot-Matrix. To get a better looking Dot-matrix Jelly Roll copy the regular Roma font to your work disk along with the Mega-Roma font for the headline.

The next problem arises when you try to create your Master Page layout. The tutorial says to place the vertical guidelines at 4 1/2" & 4 3/4" but the closest you can get them is 1/2" apart (Figure 1). The Addendum changes these settings to 4 1/2" and 5" but I disagree with this.

This is one thing I could never figure out about the way the tutorial is done, or about the layout Libraries that come with GeoPublish for that matter. A great feature of GeoPublish is the gutters that you can set up in your text regions. A gutter is a margin inside a text region that can be up to 1 inch wide (they are discussed on Page 4-54 of the manual). With the ability to set a margin within your text regions I see no reason to create the regions with separate guidelines. Even the Library layouts have separated text regions and none of them use anything but the default gutters (the default value is 5).

To make our Jelly Roll using gutters we will set one guideline down the middle of the page at 4 1/4" (I also set the left guideline at 1/2"). Our next step will be to choose the Options Menu and Set Gutters. A dialog box will come up (Figure 2) and we can set Left and Right values to 10. With this setting we will have 1/4" between our text in the middle of the page ( ˇleft column right gutter =š 10 + ˇright column left gutter =š 10 = 20 at 80 DPI = 1/4"). I generally leave the Top and Bottom Gutters set at 5 but you can also adjust these to whatever you want. By setting the gutters before we create any text regions all the regions we create will use these values. If you create some text regions prior to setting the gutters they will have the default values. Of course, you can use this to your advantage and set different gutter values for individual text regions as required.

One guideline down the middle of the page also makes it easier to place our dividing line. The tutorial says to draw the vertical divider at the 4 1/2" mark (which happens to be where they said to put the right edge of the left column) but we will draw it on our Guideline at 4 1/4" (Figure 3). In Preview Mode, and with SNAP selected (under the options menu or with the C= S keyboard shortcut), choose the Line tool and draw the line from top to bottom. (This finishes off our page and the end product in both cases can be seen in the Thumbnail images in Figures 4 and 5.)

Again, I don't agree with placing this line in Master Page mode. I add my graphics touches in Page Graphics Mode because, generally, each page will require different accents. A big case in point is placing the graphic of the little house on the page. If you are using a Dot-Matrix printer for output the foreground region (text or graphics regions) will cover the dividing line and it won't get printed (dot-matrix geoPublish output is What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get). If you are using a Laser Printer for your output (which isn't that difficult and is how any serious material should be printed) your dividing line will show right through the graphic and also through the headline text (laser geoPublish output is What-Is-There-Is-What-You-Get). This is yet another reason to use a single guideline between columns. If you are having to draw a divider above and below a graphic it is much easier to keep them lined up if you have a guideline to draw on.

That takes care of the first part of this article. In the second portion we will look at an alternative method for placing graphics with text wrap-around and a few must-have programs to make geoPublishing easier.