NVMUG eNews 10/18/2003
Last updated 10/22/2003
Creating an Appleworks Newsletter
Hartley Jim
Jackson showed how to create a newsletter in AppleWorks beginning with creating stationery, progressing to creating a word processing newsletter, and graduating to creating a newsletter in the drawing layout environment.
Hartley Jim Jackson starting the meeting with a prayer or without a chair? Picture by Gordon Alexander
1. NVMUG Learns How To Create Newsletters
2. Creating Newsletters Using AppleWorks
3. The Photoshop Elements Book for Digital Photographers
(in reviews)
1. NVMUG Learns How To Create Newsletters
At the NVMUG meeting in St. Johnsbury Saturday, Hartley Jim
Jackson describes how to create a newsletter in AppleWorks.
As reported in the Caledonian Record, Tuesday, October 21, 2003
Hartley Jim
Jackson showed how to use AppleWorks to create three different forms of newsletter at the Northern Vermont Macintosh Users Group in St. Johnsbury on Saturday.
He began with creating a page of stationery, worked up through a word processing document, and graduated to a page layout using the drawing environment.
Apple user groups began creating newsletters in AppleWorks in 1984, the year the Macintosh was born. They wrote news in word processing documents on their Apple computers. They wrote reports including spreadsheets and charts where changing the data in the spreadsheet changed the chart up until the document was printed. They prepared newsletter layouts in drawing documents.
The Apple computer has been replaced by the Macintosh, and the capabilities have been greatly enhanced over almost twenty years, but the original six environments, word processing, painting, drawing, spreadsheet, database, and communications, remains unchanged except for replacing the communications with the presentations module.
AppleWorks is available for Windows PCs.
Jackson believes that the easiest way to learn to create a newsletter is to begin by creating a simple page of stationery. He showed how to use the draw tools to draw a box for a heading, add shading, and then type text in the box. He showed how to drag in a graphic or picture and add text wrap so that text would flow around the graphic. Then he showed how to save this as an AppleWorks template for writing future letters.
Then he clicked to open a template of a newsletter on a word-processing document. He explained the use of headers and footers which could contain text, graphics, page numbers, etc., but his template was created the same way as in the stationery. He showed how to use Sections to change the number of columns within a page, and how to insert outlines within the text.
Jackson told how to change column widths. He showed how to use the cursor to add graphics inline so it is anchored to that text as though it was a character, and how to use the pointer before adding the graphic so the graphic stays where you put it and the text flows around it. Option click with the text tool, and you can create a text frame on top of text so that the original text flows around the new text field. A good way to emphasize important ideas.
Jackson created a spreadsheet in this word processing document and showed how changing data in a spreadsheet changed the bars in a chart, an easy way to make corrections, or to prepare monthly reports with similar formats.
Then Jackson opened another template with a complete NVMUG newsletter set up for printing, not the monthly eNewsletter. He demonstrated how to draw and link frames. He had typed to fill some of the frames, and had dragged in items from text and AppleWorks documents to fill in the rest.
Responding to questions, Jackson said that if when you are first learning, or if you are creating a simple newsletter you will be doing yourself, it may be best to start with a word processing document. Set up your format with headers and footers, or draw a header on the first page.
Maybe draw a box and insert a frame at the bottom of the first page for a table of contents, wrapping text around it. Save this as a template, and then just fill the columns with text and graphics, and afterward fill in the table of contents.
However, if you are the editor and a number of people will be providing the contents, or you want a more professional looking document, you may prefer to set up your layout in a drawing document. Set the number of pages in the document format. Use the master page to hold items you will want to appear on every page, including the page numbers. Save this format as an AppleWorks template. Then drag or paste the contents into the linked frames you have provided for them. Expect to change the frame sizes, add fill in items, modify the size of blank areas, or edit the length of articles to just fill the space available.
2. Creating Newsletters Using AppleWorks
About the simplest newsletter is a letter, and creating a page of stationery is a good way to start learning to create newsletters in AppleWorks.
Open an AppleWorks word processing page and select Window -> Page View to see how the page will look when printed. Go to Format -> Document to set your page layout.
To create a heading, click on the toolbox at the bottom of the page to show the tools. Use the drawing tool to draw a rectangle across the top of the page. Click on the Pen Formatting button, bottom box, to select the line width for the border of the box. (Hold the cursor over a tool icon to read what it is.) While the heading box is still selected, click on the fill box, and a color, fill pattern, wallpaper or gradient to fill in the heading box.
Click on the Text tool, then option click within the heading box and type in the heading. Highlight the title text and choose a font, size, and color for it, and drag it to move it where you want it. Click on the text and the box to choose both, and go to Arrange -> Group to lock them together.
Draw a return address box the same way. Move it to where you want it. Then choose Option -> Text Wrap -> Regular so that text will flow around it. That way when you start typing your letter, you can put the salutation to the left of the return address box.
Click on the pointer tool, then click on your stationery so that there will be no text cursor will be on the page, then drag in a picture. Choose Options -> Text Wrap -> Regular and any text you type later will flow around the picture. Or create a box similar to the heading at the bottom left of the page, and list the officers of our group in the box - again using text wrap - so the signature are can be to the write of this area.
Select File -> Save As -> and then click Template in the dialogue box to save your new stationery within the Starting Points Templates. Hartley showed how to create a word processing newsletter using Format -> Sections to change the number of columns within a page. He discussed outlines and showed the difference between dragging in an inline picture and a free floating picture with added text wrap. He demonstrated a creating text in a frame place on top of text and making the text below float around the new text frame - a great way to highlight information. He also showed a live spreadsheet within the word processing document. As he changed a number in the spreadsheet, a bar on a chart changed size.
You can create a very good newsletter in word processing using Sections, Columns, and Text Wrap. This is probably the way to go if you are doing most of the writing and everything. However, if you are the editor, not a writer, and you want a more professional appearance, you may want to use the AppleWorks Drawing document like PageMaker.
David Pogue,AppleWorks 6: The Missing Manual
http://www.oreilly.com, says that with the versatility of drawing frames, the beauty of painting frames, and the power of word processing frames you can produce page layouts that rival ones produced by professional programs.
Use the document window to set the number of pages and their layout.
Use Options -> Edit Master Page. What you draw, paste, or type on to this page will appear on all pages.
Drag the text tool into the drawing document to create a linked text frame. This is the key to using a drawing document for page-layouts.
Click on the arrow pointer to see the handles, and drag these handles to set the the layout.
To create a linked frame, click the black triangle at the bottom of the first linked frame. Go to where you would like the text to continue and drag diagonally to create a text frame that is linked to the first one. Circles in the little top and bottom rectangles indicate a link.
Double click to get into the edit mode, and key in data. or paste or insert plain text or Appleworks documents. Text and AppleWorks contents will flow into the linked frames.
Speaking Text
One of the questiions asked afterward was how to get AppleWorks to speak text. Steve Farber reminded me and sent me a shareware answer, called iSpeak It. I am including this solution here because its special capabilities may interest you, then I will give you free solutions in AppleWorks and in Mac OS.
To make Appleworks talk in X (text to speech) try a small, handy shareware app called iSpeak It from
http://www.zapptek.com
Any text you can copy, you can hear or save the speech to file. But wait; there's more . . .
It's a common problem, you have so much to read but not enough time to read it all. Well, now you don't have to. With iSpeak It you can take any document and convert it into an AAC/MP3 in iTunes using your Mac's built-in text-to-speech capabilities. From there you can listen to it at your leisure or, better yet, transfer it to your iPod and listen to it on the go!
iSpeak It lets you create and edit plain text documents. It also provides powerful mechanisms for loading text into a document. You can load an existing PDF, Word, AppleWorks, RTF, text, or HTML file. You can also download web pages, news and weather forecasts. And if that wasn't enough you can always select any text from web pages, your e-mail messages, etc and load them into iSpeak It using it's Services menu item.
For for full details and earlier version updates visit http://www.zapptek.com/ispeak-it/News/.
Within AppleWorks, control-click in the button window to bring up Customize Button Bar, locate the speak text button under the word processing section and double click to put the lips in the button bar. Click on the lips to speak the highlighted text. No cost.
In Mac OS X, you can hear any text using Universal Access. Under System Preferences > Speech select the Spoken User Interface tab. It will give you options and tell and a button to click if you have not turned on Universal Access. Click to set to speak selected items when a key is pressed. Enter the key combination you want to use, like shift-control-s (hoping that combination is not used for something else). Highlight any text, and press your control combination to read it. There are other options, just look at Preferences > Speech.
No PDF Version
I had planned to accept requests and email copies of the stationery, word procesing newsletter, and drawing layout newsletter in pdf form. It would not work, but we learned something.
The two page word procssing based newsletter with two small JPEG pictures, a small spreadsheet, a chart, and demonstrations of columns and sections was not too bad, only 188 KB. The drawing based newsletter with linked text frames, four PICT photos, and four headers with emblems was a whopping 4.2 MB!
I used Photoshop Elements 2 to shrink the pixel size of the emblems in the headng and put them in GIF format> I shrunk the pixel size of the photographs and put them in JPEG format so they were small enough for web use, the resultiing PDF document was still 1.9 MB. I tried sending out one copy, and it took over 20 miinutes to upload using my modem.
I suspect that linked text frames might contribue to that 1.9 MB, and would recommend using simple text based newsletters if you are considering emailiing them. I am not offering to email these documents.
NVMUG audience payed close attention to Hartley. Photo by Gordon Alexander.
I regret that some people who had asked for a program about AppleWorks were unable to attend this meeting. But, I really appreciate the interest shown by the people who were there, including people I look up to as experts. I specially want to thank Richard Smith for the use of his projector and showing me how to use it with my iBook, and to Gordon Alexander for taking pictures.
4. AppleWorks History
I was at an AppleFest in Chicago in 1984 where Apple was showing the first Macintosh computer, but I was more impressed by the first AppleWorks. Written for the Apple computer with its command lines instead of the Mac's graphic interface with windows and icons, it nevertheless had all the AppleWorks basics: word processing, drawing and page layout, painting, spreadsheet, and database.
It was all integrated in one program. Once you learned to enter, cut, copy, and paste in a word processing page, you already knew how to cut, copy, and paste in any of the other modes. And, you could paste or import text, graphics, or a spreadsheet directly into a drawing document. It was so magical, that I can still feel the thrill of it.
Apple formed a separate company called Claris to reduce the appearance of competing with other companies, encourage them to develop software. A small company, Styleware, began writing GSWorks for the Apple II GS. Claris bought the company and hired the programmers to complete the program which became AppleWorks GS with a Macintosh like graphic user interface.
These same programmers developed the concept of frames and produced ClarisWorks. ClarisWorks still had the same tight integration of the original six modes, or environments, now designed as frames: word processing, spreadsheet, database, painting, drawing and communications. Other Claris engineers completed work on ClarisWorks 5, which Apple took back as AppleWorks 5.
When Apple produced Mac OS X they converted Appleworks using Carbon to run on it. They dropped the communications mode, and added a presentation mode. The initial carbon version was near disasters because it was so slow, but speed was restored with AppleWorks 6.1.
Since then, Apple has been developing other new products, like iPhoto and iTunes, and we have seen no evidence of progress to enable AppleWorks to use native Mac OS X capabilities, such as the font tools available in Cocoa.
On March 17, this appeared in Think Secret on the Internet:
If you're waiting for AppleWorks 7, look instead for iWorks, coming from Apple later this year. Sources said that iWorks will consist of a word processing application tentatively calledDocument,Apple's Keynote presentation software, a spreadsheet application, and a database app. Unlike AppleWorks 6's integrated format, iWorks' apps will be separate programs but connected, much like Apple's iLife. Look for more details on iWorks from Think Secret in the near future.