Computers: Getting a handle on desktop publishing: Climbing the ladder to success

It was dumb volunteering to produce the next residents' association newsletter because the honorary secretary had fallen off a ladder. Dumb, too, to boast that it would look like a newspaper. It was OK in the end, but took more than 12 hours to produce two sides of A4, writes Charles Burgess.

GST's Pressworks, which I was using on my Tandon 386 PC-compatible, provides ready-made templates for everything from newsletters to letterheads. However, I thought the newsletter templates were dreadful, so I started from scratch.

Pressworks works, like most of its competitors, by you drawing frames on a page and then filling them with either headlines, text (or both), pictures from clip-art, graphs or tables. These frames can then have borders put around one or more sides to produce rules on a page or fancy boxes. The frames can be tinted, to produce background shade and headlines can be white on black. There were several fonts and, having toyed with a stencilled look for an action-packed-looking masthead, I plumped for a Caslon Open Face to give the association the dignity it deserves.

I had trouble getting the frames to all line up in the right place as I proceeded down the page - more my fault than the program's. And I found it was sometimes difficult to find my way around the User's Guide. I never, for instance, figured out how to draw a straight lines to act as rules between columns.

It also took a while to figure out how to link frames together so that if a story was going across, say, three columns, the words flowed from the first frame, to the second and so on. At one point I clicked on frame one, then three and then two and did not realise my mistake. It is rather disconcerting seeing copy flying about with such abandon.

The biggest panic was when I was probably getting a bit cocky and tried to put some bullets on the front of four or five lines, highlighting items on the agenda for our general meeting. But every paragraph on the whole page received a bullet and I could not delete them. Eventually they all disappeared but I cannot remember how because it was two o'clock in the morning.

Being a computer dummy, it was surprising how easy it was to pick things up. Getting text to curve around, or writing someting in a starburst once meant endless trips to a printer and redoing of proofs. My wedding invitations were done to look like a newspaper billboard and it took three weeks. I recreated it this week in half an hour.