ANTIC PUBLISHER SUPER DISK BONUS MANUAL BY NADAV GUR Antic Publisher is all the software you need for creating personalized newsletters, ads, flyers, greeting cards in a multitude of print styles that you design yourself. Add graphics and then print the page just as it appears on your screen. It's all done nearly effortlessly with pull-down menus and a joystick. Antic Publisher is both a font editor and a page designer. Several interesting fonts are included with Antic Publisher -- including a Hebrew alphabet designed by this software's Israeli author. At the top of the screen you'll see a menu bar with four choices -- Font, Graphics, DOS and Quit. Move your cursor with the joystick. When you press the trigger, the menu you chose drops down and another cursor appears on the top menu option. Again, use the joystick and trigger to select an option. At the bottom of each one of the first three menus is the Exit option. Clicking on Exit returns the cursor to the Menu Bar. Many of the windows must also be closed by pressing the joystick button. The Disk Directory display is a good example of this. Let's see a quick example of just what ANTIC PUBLISHER can do by loading a sample screen. Click on GRAPHICS, turn your disk over so that Side 'A' is facing up (we didn't have enough room for these files on Side 'B') and click on LOAD. Next, choose either HOWDY or NADAV Press [CONTROL][SHIFT] [I] to change screen colors, if necessary. Press [SELECT] to return to the Main Menu. FONT MENU A Character code in Antic Publisher is a number assigned to each specific character. Each font has a maximum of 85 characters, so the codes range from 0 to 84. Each character in Antic Publisher is assigned a keystroke too -- the key you must press to get that character onscreen. For instance, the standard Antic Publisher character coded 27 is "A" and you put it on the graphic screen by pressing the "A" key. It's a good idea to make sure that your character codes match the keystrokes. After choosing the EDIT selection in the font menu, enter the code of the character to be edited. This character must be present in memory. The EXTEND selection lets you add characters to the font in memory without editing them. For example, if you want to create an "A" and have it correspond to the [A] key (code 27), but don't want to create characters 0-26, you can EXTEND your font to 27 and start working on the [A] immediately. After selecting EXTEND, the computer will ask you for the code (maximum 84) of the character you want to start with. When you select LOAD, the computer will look for .FNT files. Selecting a font erases the one currently in memory. If you choose SAVE, enter a filename at the prompt -- only the filename, no extender or device specification. Use the CREATE selection to create a new font. A window shows the sizes 8 X 8, 8 X 16, 16 X 16 and 24 X 16. Again, this option erases the font currently in memory. The STATUS selection opens a window showing the last symbol in memory, as well as the height and width of the font. GRAPHICS MENU You can load and print 62-sector graphic files such as uncompressed Micro Illustrator and Micro-Painter pictures. Make sure each file has a .PIC extender before you load it through the graphics menu. The first option of the Graphics Menu is EDIT, which switches you to the graphics editor. ERASE simply erases the graphics screen. LOAD and SAVE work like those on the Font Menu, except that the extender for the filename will be .PIC instead of .FNT, and the file loaded or saved will be a 62-sector graphics file. (Try using your favorite GRAPHICS 8 microscreens and ComputerEyes images here!) The PRINT option is a screen dump for Epson-compatible printers with graphics capability. Printouts are twice as big as what you see on the screen display. The SPACE option can change the number of pixels moved by the cursor each time a character is printed on the graphics screen. The number you enter is actually offset from the font's width. For example , I designed a small font -- only four pixels wide -- using the 8 X 8 setting from the Create menu. The spacing I used was -4. Font width 8 plus the offset of -4 moves the cursor four pixels each time I type a character. In Hebrew, you write from right to left, so when I designed the 8 x 8 Hebrew font included on this disk, I made the bit spacing -17. A font width of 8 plus the offset of -17 makes the cursor move backwards. The DOS menu contains the options Directory, Rename, Unprotect and Protect, which all work just as they do with standard DOS. FONT EDITOR When you enter the Font Editor, the sign you chose to edit is seen enlarged. Below are its code and keypress, along with the six editor commands. Edit the enlarged image of the character with the joystick. Pressing the joystick button toggles the selected pixel on or off. Enter a command by typing its first letter on the keyboard: COMPUTE places the character you're editing into memory. If you exit without computing it, you'll lose it. EXIT returns you to the main screen. KILL clears only the character you are editing, erasing it from memory whether you compute it or not. NEXT moves you to the next character. If there isn't one, the program extends the font to it and clears it. The LAST command moves you to the previous character. You cannot edit characters with a code less than 0 or greater than 84. MOVE lets you copy characters. You'll be prompted for the the source and destination characters. GRAPHICS EDITOR The graphics editor is where you edit the page to be printed. All the editing is done on a GRAPHICS 8 screen. The graphics cursor at the top of the screen can be moved with the joystick or [ARROW] keys. The [RETURN] key moves the cursor to the start of the next line. Pressing the joystick button paints a pixel onscreen. Pressing the button again pixel erases it. Pressing [START] draws a line between the pixel underneath the cursor and the last pixel plotted. Use [OPTION] to exit the Graphics Editor. To invert your screen colors simultaneously press [CONTROL] [SHIFT] [I]. Pressing a key puts the corresponding character on the screen. A character which doesn't exist yet will not appear. Pressing [SELECT] toggles between uppercase and lowercase letters. You can load pictures created with other programs , add text and print them. You can use uncompressed Micro Illustrator pictures, Micro-Painter files, and any other picture occupying 62 sectors on the disk. All you have to do is rename the picture to have a '.PIC' extender and than load it through the graphics menu. SCREEN DUMP The screen dump is 1.5 bigger than a normal Epson dump. Since the control codes are stored in separate strings, it should be easily adaptable to other printers which have 640-column graphics capability. It is very easy to modify it to printers which have an upside-down pin configuration (top pin = 1). (You may have to adjust one or more of your printer's configuration (or DIP) switches before the screen dump will work properly.) Public domain and commercial screen dumps offer variable sizes which can make Antic Publisher an even more useful and creative program. Since Antic Publisher saves its screens as standard 62-sector Graphics 8 screens, almost all screen dump software will be able to use it.
Back to previous page