I downloaded r8 and got it installed manually due to
previously mentioned installer probs. (Note: I downloaded
it with Netscape and tried using both Winzip and PowerArchiver
to uncompress it. Both ways the install crashed. When I
used Winzip to verify the archive, however, it said that the
archive was not corrupted. If the archive had even 1 bit
corrupted, wouldn't winzip say that it was?? Could it be
something as simple as an incorrect file attribute??)

My general reaction - it showed lots of work. More features
seem to be enabled and it doesn't seem to crash as often as
r7 did. With r7 it crashed often just from loading a second
document. Unfortunately in other ways r8 has become less usable
than r7 was for me. Specific items are listed below:

Again, my test platforms:
HOME: Athlon 700MHz with 128MB RAM, ATI 32MB graphics card,
Windows 98se, HP Deskjet 842C (USB) printer.
WORK: Pentium II 450MHz with 128MB RAM, Matrox Millenium,
Windows NT 4.0, spiffy HP postscript laser printers
on a network.

Good Points (for me)

Improved asthetically. Gadgets and scrollbars refresh
better than they did. Added jpeg import filter (yay!)

Bugs:
1: JPEG import filter - nice to see it exists, but it is useless -
at least for color pictures. The colors are totally wrong.
It is like looking at a picture half in negative and through a
yellow piece of glass.

2: BME - resizing a window with a picture in it still results in
corruption of the graphic as follows: When expanding a window,
the picture moves down and right to stay in the center of the
window area. Only the original area of the picture gets
refreshed, however, causing the new area to be filled with
bits of the scrollbars.

3: PGS and BME - Often, when the main window is resized the position
of a picture or document window is put up at the top of the area,
with the top of the sub window COMPLETELY UNDER the tool bar. This
can be cleared up most of the time by selecting "Hide Toolbar" and
then showing it again, which caused the window to be repositioned
correctly below the toolbar. This also happens when a doc or
picture is first opened. Window positions seem to not be
remembered correctly and I have had occasions when windows were
so high that I could not see the top bar and could not move the
window at all.

4: PGS - The font style buttons on the edit palette are physically
selectable, but they still don't seem to do anything. If I want
Times to be bold, I have to manually select "Times New Roman Bold"
as the font.

5: It is still very easy to crash the PDF export function. I have not
characterized the problem yet. It may be related to certain
text attributes.

6: The Shadow font requestor does not get refreshed properly. If I
select a custom shadow, when I get back to the main shadow window
it is a mess and I can't read what to do next. (I hope that
description made sense).

7: Font outline mode does not work at all. There is no visible
line (like it is not stroked).

8: Printing is not working, at least on my Deskjet 842C. Fonts that
look nice on the screen are scrunched up on the printout (like
the width was set to less than 25% or something) and the printouts
are in the wrong orientation - portrait mode pages come out in
landscape and landscape pages are printed in portrait - cut off
both ways! This is worse than r7. In r7 I could not print in
landscape, but portrait mode worked and the fonts looked the same
as on the screen.

There are also a couple of other things that may or may not be bugs,
depending on how the features are supposed to work and I can find no
documentation about them (there may be some, but I could not find it).

A: I asked last week but nobody responded - how can I use my fonts
from the Amiga version? There are a lot of fonts that I need to
use, and NONE of them are Truetype. How can I load my old docs?

Since I first wrote this two days ago I have experimented with
ATM (lite 4??) and several other utilities, trying to add my type
1 postscript files into Windows. All have been failures. None
of the programs seems to recognize the pfb and afm files that
I have been using for years. I tried a utility to convert to
ascii mode (pfa??) and a couple of other things, but nothing
works.

Also, if we use the postscript files through Windows, or convert
them to truetype, do we lose the information that was in the font
metric files?? I have noticed that a form I had made up in 3.3
which uses underscores for blanks that people fill in on the form
does not have the same spacing in Arial or Helvetica on 4.0 that
it did with Triumvirate on 3.3. Is there a FAQ for 4.0 Windows
that describes how I can get my fonts set up?

Please, somebody help me out here!

B: I see that exported PDF files seldom have the fonts that I used
in them. Is there a list of fonts that have to be used in PDF,
or are non-standard fonts embedded by PageStream in the files so
they can be read anywhere (like in postscript printing)? If
there is an approved list of fonts that we should limit to when
printing to PDF, maybe PageStream should warn us if it does
substitutions. Also, shouldn't gradient fills be exported to PDF?
They are not.

C: How do I get my keyboard shortcuts? F10 refresh would be
especially nice.

Well, I hope this was helpful. I guess I will be continuing to use
3.3 on my Amiga 3000 until r9 comes out (or r8a??). I will continue
to play with 4.0 until then, however, and will try to characterize it
more fully.

Steve Meloche
(Loyal Pagestream user since 1.7)
HOME: meloche@k-online.com
WORK: steve.meloche@itt.com