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On Pagestream r8a:
Much better! This is what r8 should have been!
There are improvements on several levels over r7 and
even r8:
* Fonts are not squished in printouts now.
* Windows do not seem to open under the tool bar any more.
* The installer worked like a charm.
That was quick!
Here is a preliminary beta bug report. Items are marked
as "Minor", "Danger!", "Showstopper", "Feature not ready",
or suggestion:
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Feature not ready:
JPEG import filter still has incorrect color handling.
What's with all the yellow?
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Feature not ready:
BME still does not handle window resizing. It only
draws in the rectangle of the original window and fills new
area with junk.
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Minor:
Requestors with a highlighted button like "Okay"
do not allow return key to activate button.
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Minor:
Several gadgets are not drawn correctly. For instance,
on the edit pallete for text - the buttons to the left of
the font size and spacing values have a vertical white
line over them.
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Showstopper:
It still prints the wrong direction on my HP Deskjet 842C!
A portrait page comes out at a right angle (in landscape),
cut off at the right side of the page. I can't seem
to even force it to come out the right way by playing
with the Windows printer requestor.
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Danger!
Autobackup does not work. This compounds the problem that when
Pagestream crashes during a save (a VERY frequent occurence)
you are left with a zero length file and no copy of all your
work. Aaaargh!
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Danger!
The program is still very unstable. Like previous versions,
the longer the program is open the more likely it is to crash
even doing simple operations. For example: I open an eight
page document and change a font on two lines of text from Arial
Bold to Arial Bold Italic. Save doc. Okay so far. Change another
line to that font. Save again - CRASH. File is lost forever.
The program has crashed during saving, loading simple gif
pictures, un-minimizing a document window, and exporting
PDF files with two words in black&white with one font.
I can't find a pattern to it yet. I can furnish debug info
on types of crashes if it would help.
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Feature not ready:
Applied styles still don't work - even with fonts that have
defined bold and italic versions...
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Showstopper:
Some (Postscript) fonts come out at least twice as wide as they
should, with regular spacing so they overlap.
(I will put my font melodrama in a separate message.)
Also, many fonts are just rendered as Arial, even though they
are viewable by other Windows apps. Is there some kind of
substitution going on? They aren't listed in the replacement
requestor at loading time but the fonts all show up as Arial on
the screen and in printouts.
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Minor:
The first time I try to place a text frame on a page using
the frame tool by dragging with the mouse, the mouse disengages
from the activity almost immediately as if I had let go
of the mouse button. I suspect it has something to do with
the window being selected. The window *looks* like it is
selected but if I first touch the page with the pointing tool
then everything works fine. It only happens the first time
I do it after PageStream is started.
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Minor:
When PageStream is opened it puts the edit pallete under the
Windows 98 taskbar (which I leave open and set to "always on top")
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Minor:
There are still problems with the toolbar. When I start PageStream
the window is maximized and all opened documents now correctly open
below (and not hidden under) the tool bar. However, whenever I
resize the Pagestream window the taskbar does not refresh correctly.
Doing a "hide toolbar" and then a "show toolbar" fixes the
problem and makes it so that I can't mess it up until the next time
the window gets resized.
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Suggestion:
The previous item leads to the following observation. The size and
positions of sub-windows seems to assume that the main Pagestream
window is at full screen. If I change the Pagestream window to
half of the screen size, a "new" opens a window much bigger than
the screen (which is mostly hidden). I would suggest:
1: when opening a document the window should be completely within
the Pagestream window - including the important gadgets and all
framing to allow resizing.
2: I would like the option of tying the tool box and edit pallete
to the main Pagestream window (I would just like to have the
option - it is easy to lose those little buggers amidst the other
windows on a hi res screen).
3: The main PageStream window should never extend under the Windows
task bar.
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Suggestion:
Bubble help, bubble help! Please!
Also I miss my keyboard shortcuts from the Amiga version.
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Minor:
One bug that has lasted since 3.x: some structured drawings,
after they have been placed on a document, are not selectable
with the mouse. The only way to grab them is to do a select-all
and then de-select everything else. It is like Pagestream sort
of forgets where they were put when trying to select them.
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Minor:
The mouse pointer does not change when over window
borders for re-sizing.
Well, that's it for now. It keeps getting closer to being
usable. When the font handling and crashing is fixed, I
will start trying to get actual work done with it. Until
then, I will stick with 3.3 on the Amiga. 4.0 has now
reached the point, though, where it is fun to play with it.
It makes me hungry for those extra features (and the speed
I get with it on the 700 MHz PC!!)
Keep up the good work. It's getting there!
Steve Meloche
P.S. Is anybody reading these? With the exception of
someone asking how I converted .afm's to .pfm's, I have
never gotten a response from anybody on this mailing list.
Hopefully these reports are useful to Deron at least. (?)
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