GeoPublish Tutorial Part 3 - Planning and Preparation

So far we have looked at some of the layout and design concepts that you need to take into account for each project you work on. We have also had a quick tour of the four main operating modes of GeoPublish. This time around we are going to finish our planning and do some final preparation.

Pre-Planning

Our project is to create a GeoPublish Tutorial using these articles as the text. We will, for the most part, use a 2-column layout with a large space for Article Titles at the top of each page. We will use Left and Right Master Pages so we can bind the finished product or punch holes and keep it in a binder without infringing on the text. Page Numbers will appear in the lower left corner of Left Pages and in the lower right corner of Right Pages. With this in mind it should be obvious that we are aiming for double-sided printing. We will place footers at the bottom of the pages to identify the publication. We will create a main title page with an index of articles.

Part of our planning process involves determining what output device we are going to use. Since November of 1988 my output device of choice has been a PostScript equipped printer. As mentioned last time, one of the biggest reasons for this is the crisp printouts using the scalable PS fonts. GeoPublish comes with 4 "LW" (LaserWriter) fonts and 7 other LW fonts were later released by Berkeley Softworks (LW_Zapf is an improved version of LW_Galey).

These fonts allow you to layout your document and get a relatively close approximation on-screen, and with regular printouts, of how your text will format on the PS Printer. When you do print your document, with GeoPubLaser or PostPrint, the Printer's built-in PS Fonts are substituted for the LW fonts in your document. Due to this part of the process it is important to know what fonts your printer supports. Your printout is done at the resolution of the printer (I have used 300, 600, 1200 and 2400 DPI PS Printers) rather than the 80 DPI of the GEOS screen and printers.

If these 11 LW fonts aren't enough for you then contact Dale Sidebottom (luckykds@iglou.com) and order his Laser Lover's Disk (LLD) and learn how to make use of hundreds of Public Domain PS fonts in your GeoPublish output. Dale also teaches plenty about using PostScript to get the most out of your printing experiences and the LLD is the only official source of the PostPrint program.

An added bonus of using a PS Printer for your output is speed. It used to take over 20 minutes to print one page with a multi-strike printer driver on my Dot Matrix printer. Using a PS Laser I have printed over 20 pages in just under 20 minutes.

It is also important to know the printout area supported by your printer. The first time I did a printout on an Apple LaserWriter using Legal sized paper in landscape mode I thought I had messed up in a big way as the edges did not print out. It turns out that the Apple LaserWriter would only print 6 3/4 inches across an 8 1/2 inch sheet of paper in landscape mode. Not what I wanted or what I was expecting.

Worxpace

As mentioned previously the ideal setup for our project would be Wheels with a 16 MB RAMLink and as large a partition as you can set aside. Dedicating a full 16 MB partition on a CMD HD drive would also be very good although access times are noticeably slower when working from the HD. For this project, create the biggest partition that you can on the fastest drive that you have and then continue on.

What we want in our working partition to start with is GeoPublish and the Printer Driver your system is setup to use. Depending on how your system is configured you might also need the Desktop or a Configure File if using GEOS.

Ideally we want to have a separate 'style sheet' listing what each font will be used for and the point size for that particular use. In this way you can easily reference your style sheet rather than having to go back to previous pages to check what font and size you used. The consistency this provides will give your publications a more polished and professional look. Copy these fonts to your geoPublish Project Disk and then print out this list for handy reference.

LW_Roma (aka Times Roman)
Front Page Headline - 80 points (bold)
Article Text - 12 points

LW_Cal (aka Helvetica)
Article Title 30 points (first page)
24 points (subsequent)
Sub-Headings - 14 points (bold)

LW_Zapf (aka Zapf Chancery)
Page Numbers - 14 points
Continued - 10 points

LW_Giannini (aka Avant Garde)
Footers - 14 points
Captions - 14 points
Call Outs - 18 points

LW_Shattuck (aka Zapf Dingbats)
End of article - 12 points

Note - (if you are using two disk drives the fonts, printer driver and any Desk Accessories need to be on the disk with GeoPublish and your documents need to be on the disk in the second drive).

If you still have enough space add geoWrite, geoPaint and the Photo Manager.

Not Charlie McCarthy

The next thing we need to do is create a couple of Dummy Articles. These come in very handy during the creation of any geoPublish document in case you find that you have some extra space to fill or come across some new information that will make a great article. Rather than having to exit geoPub and start geoWrite to create the new piece (you can't create new geoWrite files with the Editor Mode) you just import one of your Dummy Articles and then rename it later.

Start geoWrite and create a new file called Dummy1. Select the LW_Roma font in 12 point size and write anything you want. A simple sentence or just one word will do. Close that file and create a second one called Dummy2 and do the same with the font selection and short writing. Save both of these files to your document disk.

And speaking of our document disk, I like to have three disks that I save my files to. I rotate the disks for backup purposes so that I am not going to lose any more than one days (or a few hours) work. For this project I have a partition on my RAMLink plus two Native formatted (1.6 MB) FD floppy disks. One of the disks is labelled 'even days' and one is labelled 'odd days' and I swap them daily to store my latest file versions on. In this way, if something happens to my RL, I am covered. If a file gets corrupted on my RL and I copy it to one disk I still have the other copy on the other disk so I am only going to lose what I did that day. Make yourself some project disks.

The other thing that will really help once we start using Page Layout mode is to have a good idea how big the articles are. To get this kind of feel for your layout make sure you format your GeoWrite articles in the font and size that you want (LW_Roma 12 point in this case) and print off your articles. Take the time now to proofread what you have written.

With your printouts you should be able to gauge whether a certain article will require 1 1/2 pages or 2 full pages or more. If you know this, and add this to your sketches, you have a good idea where to break columns and if one article will fill a certain page location better than another article.

That ends our initial preparations. Next time we will begin creating our first geoPublish document.

Until then, enGEOy your Commodore!

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