Some of the existing professional publishing products are difficult to use, expensive, and have a steep learning curve. With iStudio Publisher we have set out to reverse these issues.
The ethos behind iStudio Publisher is to make DTP available to a wide range of users by offering an intuitive interface, whilst at the same time providing sufficient functionality to create professional looking documents. One of our primary design goals for iStudio Publisher is to allow users to get started quickly.
We see iStudio Publisher filling the gap in between the word processor applications and the high end applications. Our development is based on what users of iStudio products want and we encourage our users to provide feedback to help shape our future product development.
We would definitely recommend that you try the iStudio Publisher 30-day trial before making a purchase. The trial gives you the same functionality as a fully licensed, purchased copy.
Regarding your lost hard drive experience, from iStudio Publisher version 1.0.5 onwards (due soon) there will be a simple Relicense option that will allow you to recover your license after a hard drive replacement and without having to refer back to your original purchase email.
We are planning to add user interface localization to later releases of iStudio Publisher version 1. With a localized user interface, all of the controls, dialogs, messages and Help pages will be localized to the user's chosen language / locale. It is likely that we will schedule the localization delivery in three stages:
- Western Europe;
- Eastern Europe; and
- Asia.
We are also considering localization to Middle Eastern languages, as we've had a number of requests for this.
Regarding the script and language handling capabilities of iStudio Publisher, in terms of the documents you are able to produce, here are three important considerations:
1) Internal iStudio Publisher operation
The iStudio Publisher application is completely Unicode in its internal handling of text codepoints. This means you can enter any Unicode codepoint and it will not be translated into any other encoding. The layout routines use Unicode analysis, line breaking and formatting rules. How you enter these codepoints into a document depends on your chosen input method. Some typical ones are:
- via the keyboard - for example, if you have a keyboard that can generate CJK codepoints then these can be entered directly, or you can use key combinations if that is appropriate to your keyboard / locale;
- via copy and paste of text, from another application; or
- via the Edit -> Special Characters menu option.
2) Glyph rendering
Each Unicode codepoint entered into a document can only be rendered if it has an associated glyph in the chosen font. If you see rectangles, blocks or other strange characters, it means that the active font does not have the appropriate glyphs for the codepoints and a different font should be selected.
3) Internal support for layout of non-Western and complex scripts
The current version of iStudio Publisher does not expose support for non-Western and complex scripts to users, although the internals already handle them. When this support is added, users will be able to choose the language of each complete document, then override this on a per-paragraph basis. Support will encompass:
- right-to-left scripts
- bidirectional embedding
- diacritic stacking
- normalisation of codepoints, combining characters
- grapheme clusters
- contextual glyph substitution
- spelling and hyphenation support
Colour management is a complex subject, and one that we have been working on for some time. The most important issue from our perspective is to correctly gauge how much we make this visible in the application, bearing in mind the background of our typical users. This is quite tricky as we are attracting users with a very wide range of capabilities. We need to support users who do not care about (or understand) colour management, whilst at the same time provide sufficient coverage so that informed users can understand how we use colour in a typical workflow, and can get documents to print with predictable results.
The next maintenance release of iStudio Publisher (version 1.0.5) will have improved colour support as outlined below.
Version 1.0.4 handles images as follows:
If you import an image that has an embedded colour profile, the profile will be preserved, will be used during display, and will be embedded in any created PDFs along with the image data. If the image has no associated profile it will be treated generically, and the results may be less predictable.
Version 1.0.5 adds the following for internal colours:
Wherever you specify colours within iStudio Publisher, such as for text, stroke, fill and shadow, you use Apple's Color Chooser (as is also currently the case). Some of the Chooser's colour pickers allow you to select the input colourspace, and this information is now preserved within our document structure. Associated colour profiles are embedded in iStudio document files, ensuring that colour definitions within the file are portable across platforms. Generated PDFs will also preserve this information.
Previous versions of iStudio Publisher converted all colours to the Mac OS internal calibrated RGB, which was then saved in our file structure. For most people this will not have been a noticeable issue.
There are certain things that we don't do, which comes back to the level of capability of a typical user. We don't allow you to assign profiles to images (you have to do that elsewhere before importing), and we don't support spot colours or Pantone colours, because of the cost of licensing the technology and the necessary complexity of the application's user interface. We don't want to scare people off who don't know what they are, or have no idea why they might need them. However, we may change our view on these issues if enough people request them, and we have had quite a few related support requests to date.
iStudio Publisher includes an Application Update Roadmap, which lists the new features and other improvements that will be added through the future 1.x versions. You can open this Roadmap from the Help menu. We will be issuing an updated Roadmap with each new update release of iStudio Publisher.
