Following along the same lines as my first Create page layout test (using Create 5.1 in Rhapsody 5.1) I have done a second test using Create 10.0 (CreateOSX) in Rhapsody 5.6.

The Original
As with the other test I used random content from JPL to put together this layout (and as before, I used content from the Cassini-Huygens mission... so maybe it wasn't completely random).

The layout was done with three master layer pages: background right, background left and rules. These were applied to all pages except the title page.

Do to limited resources (and time to actually spend on this) I limited the document to 5 pages. The body text is made up of linked text fields and text "wraping" is actually me just a justing the field height within the guides of the rules master layer. complete wrapping is possible with text fields, but it breaks linked text fields. I tend to only use the wrapping of text around odd shapes in Create for this reason. It is easier to use more linked text fields of different sizes than to break up a continuous body of text.

The following image is the layout in Create on my Rhapsody 5.6 system while I was still working on it.

When I finished I saved a PostScript document (from the print dialog box) for moving to another system... in this case those other systems were my PowerBook running Mac OS X v10.2 and my PowerMac 7100 running Mac OS 8.6.

Creating a PDF
With the systems I have, I have five options for generating a PDF from a PostScript document: Acrobat Distiller 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, PStill in Rhapsody and PStill in Mac OS X. As I did not limit myself to fonts that were available for all the systems involved (Rhapsody, Mac OS X and Mac OS 8/9), I was in an odd position. What would yield the best results? As I had not embedded the fonts in the PostScript document, Distiller (all versions) was dropped right off the bat (I used Distiller 4.0 in the previous test). Further, PStill for Rhapsody was finicky about what fonts it would use.

This left me with PStill for Mac OS X. One of the wonderful things about the current version of PStill is that it can use NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody fonts for distilling PDFs. So I just made sure that when I brought the PostScript document over that I also included the fonts I used. PStill has a special directory for converted (to PostScript) TrueType fonts which are in about the same form as the Rhapsody fonts. Putting my additional fonts in there and make sure to update PStill's font list was all that was needed to get a wonderful PDF of my test document.

This next image is what the out put of PStill looked like on my PowerBook in Acrobat 5.0.5.

The type in the title was adjusted using Rhapsody native tracking/kerning tools (these tool still exist in Mac OS X for Cocoa applications, and are even more enhanced with TextExtras).

As before, I'm happy with the out come of this test. Even with a very early release (July 2000) of the Create rewrite, the documents it is able to put out are amazing.

The final product was small enough that I'll include it here:





Stone Design's Create(tm)
2004-06-19 00:28:29 -0600