Marty:
>> ...I need a way to
>> automate jump lines -- the lines that say "continued on page ..." and
>> "continued from page...."...
>>;
>
> It may be a bit cryptic (I never used it...), but you can find it at
> this place:
> http://www.pagestream.org/showdocs.php?id=91
I haven't checked the reference in Theo's response, but I used to do it
all the time in my newsletter. First, remember that you can set up text
frames of any size in PageStream. I kept stacks of little frames the
width of my columns and maybe 16 points high on the pasteboard. The
first frame in each stack would be the "Article1 continued on p. ", the
next would be an "Article1 continued from", and so on. (Actually I was
using Dingbat arrows in place of the "continued" text.) I would then
drop copies of these frames onto the pages at the appropriate points,
customizing the "Title" text and, perhaps, the height of the frames as
required. They didn't always pair up. I don't think it's good policy to
use "continued from" when the body text clearly continues from the
previous page to the beginning of the next. But it was a simple enough
system.
Each mini-jump frame was preset for text wrapping. Therefore, when you
dropped one at the bottom of a column, the text above would adjust,
usually meaning that one line moved from the bottom of one column to the
top of the next. Dropping one at the top of a column meant text in that
column would move down which, of course flowed through the whole article.
You don't want to incorporate the jump lines directly into the text of
the articles because it gets in the way of editing the body text. If
your edits make a column longer or shorter, the jump lines move with
them. By giving them their own frames, they stay put at the beginning or
end of their columns. At the end you would then have to make whatever
adjustments might be needed to the articles themselves to produce the
layout aesthetics you wanted.
To set up an initial stack, you first need to link all the frames in a
set. Type the initial line of text in the first frame, then insert a
column break. That will put the cursor in the next frame where you
repeat these steps, treating it as a "continued from" frame.
For a dressier look, you can use the "Paragraph rules"; feature which
will put a rule before or after the text in the jump frame to clearly
separate it from the body text. It's been a very long time, but the last
time I used this feature, some of the rules options didn't work as they
were supposed to. I believe that you can't actually adjust the point
size of the rule. I'm confident that the "custom" setting didn't work
and I think that even the medium and thick presets didn't work. But the
fine width setting was "fine" for me.
I haven't tried this, but you should be able to further automate the
procedure by bookmarking the "Article1," "Article2" text phrases. That
would allow you to change all the text in a set of jump lines in one
step. My newsletter was usually four or eight pages, so I was fine with
doing it manually. Most articles jumped only once, which is generally to
be preferred.
Another automation trick would be to set up paragraph formats for the
jump lines. One format would be for "continued from" frames and might
include a rule below the text and the other would be identical but
without the rule. The two formats could then be set to alternate with
one another. Some things can't be set in a paragraph format, however. My
article titles were set in small caps and the page number was italic so
a paragraph format would have to be one or the other. Nonetheless, you
should have at least one paragraph format to cover jump lines.
Without getting into details, I would recommend that you set up a
template file for your newsletter. This would have your masthead,
running headers or footers, postal indicia, and your pasteboard
prepoplulated with the jump frames, boilerplate, and any graphics that
you might use regularly. This removes the risk of doing a Save and
accidentally overwriting last month's newsletter with the current one.
I haven't used MS Publisher, but I'm sure you'd find PageStream very
easy to use. In spite of a simple, logical, GUI paradigm however, it is
a full-fledged publishing program with pretty much all the features in
the state-of-the art programs from outfits like Adobe. That means there
are hundreds of unfamiliar features that you may never or only rarely
use. So it's easy to get the basics down, but a work of love and labor
to exploit it to its full potential. It's been years since the last
printed manual was published, but the help system on the web site is
pretty nearly up to date and mostly clearly written. But, there's also
this list where you can find help. There's always someone on the list
who's "been there, done that" and willing and ready to make suggestions.
Good luck.
HB
.
