{fh400D0F0Publisher
{fb1ff0000                Impression
{fb1000000
According to Computer Concepts' latest advertising (e.g. in April 95 Acorn User) _Style_"Reviews.Apps.Style1" is the most powerful and comprehensive member of the Impression family.

Publisher is very similar to Style but has a different target market, namely professional DTP users.

The main differences between Style and Publisher seem to be:-

 Irregular graphic frames

 Enhancements to the control of output to typesetting machines

 Needs lots more memory

Although Publisher can be run on a 2Mb machine, the size of document that can be handled is quite limited.

So if you don't actually need irregular frames, and if you're going to send your files to an Acorn based print shop (who will presumably load your document into Publisher Plus and set the printing controls the way they want), you may find that _Style_"Reviews.Apps.Style1" is a more suitable product for your needs.

{fb10000cc         The Competition
{fb1000000
I don't believe that there is anything running on any desktop platform anywhere that matches Impression.

In terms of DTP Impression probably comes a close second to Quark Express on the _Mac_"Reviews.Apps.MacFS".

In terms of word processing, Impression is almost as good as any dedicated word processing package on any machine anywhere.

But nothing combines DTP and word processing like Impression.

In the rest of this review, I'm just going to compare the word processing capabilities of Impression with the best selling word processing package in the world, Word for Windows. OK, this isn't entirely fair because I'm comparing Impression 4.01 running on a 4Mb A5000 under RiscOs 3.10 that I use at home, with W4W version 2.0c running on a 3Mb 386 under _Windows_"Features.Windows" 3.1 that I use at work. I.e. an almost up-to-date Publisher vs. a somewhat older version of W4W.

Impression would seem to invite direct comparison with W4W, in that they've borrowed the toolbar idea, and kept most of the same tools in the same position.

{fb1000000              WYSIWYG

{fb10000ffW4W claims to be WYSIWYG, but I don't think that there is any such thing under a Windows 3.1 environment. The shapes and sizes of the fonts are almost never the same as what really gets printed, and this can make it very difficult to make text fit nicely into boxes. {fb1ff0000Impression is absolutely 100% WYSIWYG to the limits of the graphical resolution of the monitor and printer you are using.

{fb1000000         Drag and Drop text

{fb10000ffHailed as a wonderful new feature of W4W, in practice compatibility with a single button mouse means that it is difficult for W4W to guess when you intend to drag and drop, and when you are just trying to select an area of text. {fb1ff0000Drag and drop works fine in Impression.

{fb1000000            Layered Styles

{fb1ff0000Impression allows several styles to be layered on top of each other and applied to a piece of text, so you can build a style that can apply bold italics with hyphenation disabled to small pieces of text without affecting the underlying font, point size, justification etc. {fb10000ffW4W only allows one style to apply to any one piece of text, but you can build one style from another by layering effects on top of it. In practice this means that you end up with numerous similar styles.

{fb1000000       One style per paragraph

{fb10000ffIn W4W, each paragraph can have only one style. If your magazine has the habit of referring to itself in a special font, colour and point size combination, then you have to build this up as a set of effects applied one by one to the word in question. If you decide to change the style of the paragraph at a later date, then all the effects are lost, and you have to add them again. In practice you would build a macro to add the effects. {fb1ff0000Impression allows a style or an effect to be applied to any set of characters, from a single byte to an entire document.

{fb1000000            Annotations

{fb10000ffW4W allows you to add invisible annotations to a document. Comments to yourself that do not get printed.





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