DesignMaster

What is DesignMaster?

DesignMaster is our interactive page makeup program that uses a Unix windows environment. An intuitive graphical interface is used to create free form, frame-oriented single or multi-page layouts. This application can be used alone for highly complex interactive work or as a layout and correction tool for pages created by our batch paginator, Masterpage.

Key Design Features

• With the DesignMaster toolbox, many helpful design tools are just a click away. Tools include draw-frame, rotate, zoom, crop, scale, edit, link and unlink.
• Multiple frame shapes include rectangular, circular, oval, rounded corner boxes and free-form polygons.
• Frames can be colorized and outlined. See ColorMaster for more information.
• Crop-to-fit and Scale-to-fit tools allow you to size a graphic to a predetermined area. See Graphics for more information.
• Horizontal and vertical rulers. Ruler measurements are in pica/point, 1/10 inch, 1/32 inch and metric.
• Column guides and cross hairs can be used as aids in the interactive placement of frames.
• With our snap feature users customize the program’s snap logic (i.e., how frames jump to page guides). For example, snaps can be turned off or on for frame edges, cross hairs, column guides, ruler, cap height, text base lines, page trim or page margin.
• Absolute and relative frame positioning. Frames can be positioned by an absolute value from the top left of the page or relative to other frames. For example, the mnemonics BF6+12 mean bottom of frame 6 plus 12 points. Relative positioning allows the page designer to precisely place page elements.
• The move frame backward and forward features can be used to change the layering of the page.
• The step and repeat menu allows creating multiple copies of a page object.
• Gutters (i.e., white space) can be specified around each frame. In the case of irregularly shaped frames such as graphics, the gutter can be manually altered to produce the desired affect. This is done by grabbing bearoff nodes surrounding the frame and moving them with the mouse. Bearoff nodes can be moved, deleted or added. With this feature, you will never have to live with a bad wrap.
• True font wysiwyg for a true PostScript representation of your type on screen.

Key Pagination Features

• An unlimited number of page masters can be created for verso, recto, chapter and special pages.
• Text and graphics can be flowed into pre-designed frame shapes or grabbed from a wysiwyg display and positioned interactively anywhere on the page. In the latter approach, a frame will be automatically created to fix the text or graphic.
• Page management features are available to insert, delete, rename and renumber pages.
• Automatic page numbering including roman numerals.
• Tool to click lines forward or backward between columns and pages.
• The Link and Unlink tools determine the flow of text from column to column and page to page.
• The Unlock and Lock tools prevent lines from flowing forward or backward between columns and pages.
• Vertical justification modes include spacing at lines (feathering), paragraphs, marked spots, extra leads, top of column, bottom or both.
• Multiple pages can be displayed at once, easing page corrections; special facing-page display mode.
• Page specs can be printed. This includes a representation of the page layout and all the pagination styles that were used when filling the page.
• Ability to print only those pages that have changed since the last pagination process.
• Ability to suppress the printing of blank pages during color separation.