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Calamus Secrets

Dave Barkin insists Calamus SL/98 is the most powerful Desktop Publishing program available for any computer and has decided to reveal some of the hidden secrets he's discovered...

Calamus isn't perfect, there's sparse support for the current popular printers and there's no six colour printing support. However, on the plus side, there are plenty of module and driver updates and Calamus is incredibly fast - faster on an Atari TT than Quark Express on a 300MHz Power PC!

As Calamus users will be aware it's a frame based program. Images, text, lines, and so on are all placed in specially created frames but there's one frame which ought to be renamed. The program refers to the Adjustable Tiling Frame but I prefer to call it the User definable Tiling/Conversion/Cropping/Export Frame.

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According to the Calamus manual, to print out a portion of a page, you go to the tiling option and draw a user definable frame. Then, in the Print dialog, you highlight Selected tile and only that portion of the page covered by your tiling frame will be printed. Wonderful - except there were problems with this option right up until the latest release of Calamus 98 (8/98). Every time I printed using this option areas outside the frame would have smear marks. I'm pleased they've fixed it but to be honest I rarely need that particular feature. Anyway about this new title I've given to this frame, it's a case of a usable bug and it looks like the programmers didn't realise what they had created.

If you use the Bridge Module, which converts and exports frames and pages to various formats, you will find that the tiling frame is peculiarly invisible to this Module. Whatever portion of the page the tiling frame covers is considered part of the tiling frame! Sooo, this means that if you wish to convert a mixed page of graphics and text to an image, simply cover it with a tiling frame. Then using Bridge convert or export you can convert the contents of the tiling frame into the desired format!

Calamus has a fine cropping function but it's mouse controlled which means you have to draw using the cursor and if the result doesn't quite match your needs you have to abort and try again - and again and again!

Using the Adjustable tiling frame, you can draw a frame to the exact size of the desired crop, position it exactly where required and use the Bridge module to perform the conversion. Better still, Bridge allows you to specify the dpi as well as file type, so you can now create a frame at exactly the required size AND dpi. Amazing eh? Well there's more! You can also use this frame to convert to raster and vector graphics - although you cannot convert photographs to vector format you can convert text and raster shapes or even vector to vector. Any frame can be converted to raster image. This gives you the flexibility to crop then export groups of text and raster images for subsequent use. The latest version of Calamus has the Mask Module built into the program and mask frames can be handled just like other frames - The tiling frame can be used to crop/convert/export them as well.

I should also point out these above capabilities have been around since the first Calamus SL versions - we just didn't know about it! Next time we're going to explore the potential of the Star Screening Module. There are two versions of this module, The junior version which is a VERY usable demo, and the pro version. With a little help from me you'll discover the junior version can do everything the pro version does and it's quite a bit cheaper - until then!

If you have any Calamus hints and tips to share or suggestions for future Calamus related articles please get in touch via the editorial address or by email.

** BC **
dave@ataricomputing.com
** /BC **

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Calamus SL/98 Epson printer drivers

Dave has released two drivers which support almost all Epson printers at 720dpi. They do not access the 1440dpi mode because this is accomplished by half stepping the vertical run and printing a second row of dots underneath the first - similar to software interpolation which actually only provides a minimal increase in resolution. Used together with the Calamus Star Screening Module you can achieve much better results at 720dpi than Quark Express at 1440dpi.

Unlike the drivers supplied with Calamus SL both these drivers access the super-microdot mode and you'll enjoy the difference!

The slow driver produces slightly better quality in theory but in practice it's hard to see the difference. Sadly the drivers do not work with Calamus v1.09n.
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