Professional Publisher

Professional Publisher is a full function desk top publishing program based on the earlier Desktop Publisher Special Edition.

Advertised features include:

• Full WSYIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
• 12 Integral graphic fonts, 8 integral QL text fonts plus 10 non-integral fonts supplied and decorative fonts
• All fonts can be adjusted both horizontally and vertically
• 150 Integral graphic symbols and 160 Integral paint brush shapes
• Up to 15x Zoom with separately adjustable X & Y axis magnification and reduction
• 960 x 800 pixel drawing area (x 2 if you have expanded QL and cut/copy/paste over 21 pages) supporting up to 80 lines and 160 columns
• Borders and margins generated form a graphics menu
• All positions redefined piexl by pixel
• Centre and true descender editing of characters
• Merging with AND-OR-XOR
• Whole and partial reversion plus Mirror Imaging
• Switchable Grid
• Stipples, stripes, rotation
• Import text and non-text documents from The Editor
• Import text documents from any word processor (even Quill)
• Import screens, partial screens, compressed screens, part-coloured screens from EyeQ
• Import full screens saved by any graphics package
• Free-hand drawing of screens with restriction from mixing/overlapping/combining of text and pictures
• Full cut and paste facility
• Selective save
• Hierarchical escape-undo function
• Full device independence
• Portrait or Landscape Printing facility built-in
• UDGs measuring 8x8 and 16x16 pixels with full feature integral font editor
• Full feature integral graphics generator
• Left, right, centre justification (PIXEL x PIXEL)
• Bold, Italics left & Italics Right
• Pixel by Pixel or character by character movement
• Perfectly usable with a microdrive only system (384K RAM needed)
• 4 different cursors
• 4 different underline styles (single / double / plain / stipple)
• Cursor dragged user definable boxes
• Columns to any width (multiple justifications allowed)
• Epson-compatible hard copy output in either A4 or foolscap
• Variable line feeds
• Fully menu driven
• Screen & Window pans and scrolls
• Text / Picture within window pans and scrolls
• Direct Entry of text with full range of editing and movement commands
• Clip art
• Caps lock indicator
• Horizontal and vertical rulers
• Full status reports on-screen
• Help facility
• Extremely fast
• Multiple pass printing (up to 5 passes) and fully configurable printer driver
• Alteration by block, line, word, character and Pixel

Additionally, Professional Publisher supports Smiling Mouse. Owners of this mouse can use professional Publisher in a more sophisticated way. The toolkit for the Smiling Mouse is loaded as part of the Professional Publisher BOOT program.

The Pointer Environment mouse interface (QIMI or similar) is not supported.

Professional Publisher unfortunately does not support directories during configuration and still only supports a single page design. The file "variable_default" must always be present in the root directory of the medium, where the program sits. So, if one wants to put all the files of Professional Publisher in a directory, say "win1_ProPub_", the file "publish_task" must be searched for a string "variable_default", then the string changed to "ProPub_e_default". Of course, the file "variable_default" has then to be put in the directory "win1_ProPub_" and the filename changed to "e_default". Length of the directoryname plus filename has to be identical to "Variable_default".

Title: Professional Publisher
Language: SuperBASIC Compiled with Turbo + machine code extensions
Author: Andrew Astrand
Publisher: Digital Precision Ltd
Year of Publication: Unknown
Platforms Suitable for: All Sinclair QLs and emulators with minimum 640K
Commercial Status: Freeware
Price in July 1987: Unknown
Reviewed: Unknown
Sources Available from: Unknown
Latest Version available from: Sinclair QL Homepage