Bruce's book page

In 1991 I was approached by Graham Beech of Sigma Press to write a book about DTP on the Acorn Archimedes (as it was then called). This arose from a ten-part series on the subject that I was writing for The Micro User in the 'Essential Archimedes' section (it ran from October 1991 to July 1992). It was written on my trusty A310 and was based on RISC OS 2 and the software that was around at the time. Obviously things have moved on since then... but it makes an interesting retrospective view of DTP and its environs a couple of decades ago. And Chapter 9, on rudiments of design, is still as relevant today as it was then.

My thanks go to Graham and to Sigma Press, in the first instance for commissioning the book and now for giving permission for me to put it up here.

Technical note: the PDFs have been prepared from the original Impression files. This ought to mean that they appear exactly as in the printed book, but in practice two developments have prevented this. First, with the advent of RISC OS 3 and auto-kerning, the text has re-flowed on the pages to some extent, leading to the occasional widow line (look it up!) that was definitely not in the original. Secondly, some of the screen grabs in later chapters, and particularly Chapter 10, were made in a special wide-screen mode that is no longer recognized by RISC OS. The sprites were therefore invisible in the document, so I had to process them heavily, causing them to look a bit blurred now. There were also a few problems with the (current) lack of clipping of PostScript images in RISC OS, which meant that I had to recreate some of the illustrations in various cunning ways. Apart from that, What You See Is What You Got...

(Addendum, 17 May 2001: I recently found the original files that pages 222 and 228 were prepared from and have managed to include them as Draw files - via printing to PostScript and translating them with !RiScript - rather than the scruffy scans used previously. So if you downloaded Chapter 10 before that date you'll have got the old one.)

Cover (click on the image for a bigger version (39K GIF))

Shameless ego-massage

• The Micro User, December 1991
• Archive 5.5, February 1992
• Archimedes World, April 1992
• RISC User, May 1992
• Philip Woodward also cited the book in Archive 8.9, June 1995