RagTime Solo: DTP for Free |
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I am an avid FrameMaker user, but when I read in the April 2005 issue of Popular Science that a powerful program capable of page layouts like Quark Xpress and Adobe InDesign was available for free, I had to investigate for myself. I have never used Quark Xpress or Adobe InDesign, but I have taken courses on the latter, and was an avid PageMaker user back in the day. Yes, I know I'm dating myself here. RagTime GmbH of Germany sells RagTime, a desktop publishing program, for approximately U.S. $495.00 per individual user, for both Windows and Mac. Because they are not well known, at least not yet, they offer RagTime Solo as a free introduction to their commercial product. RagTime Solo is not limited in any way but is intended strictly for home and student use. The company requires that you must purchase the commercial version if you use the program for commercial purposes. Documents created in either version can be shared with the other. The only requirement of RagTime Solo is that everything except headers and callouts need to be placed inside of frames, which come in a variety of shapes, and the size of each is up to you. Your choices for the frame contents include:
Drawings are made with the included tools, which include lines, curves, and polygons. I am not sure if Visio or SmartDraw files could be imported. You can import .DOC, .RTF, and HTML files into the text frames if needed. Alas, there is not an import filter for FrameMaker .MIF files-at least not yet. Spreadsheets can both display information and perform calculations on it. You can import Excel.XLS files or use the built-in spreadsheet functions. The easiest method to sum a column of figures is just to highlight it and click the Sum (sigma) button just as you would in Excel. You can use another frame to graph the information in the spreadsheet simply by doing a drag and drop between the two frames after you set the frame type to display it. RagTime Solo refers to its documents as "living" documents, so the graph updates itself automatically to match if you later update the spreadsheet contents. Figure 1: Sample Document
Figure 1 shows a simple document I created in about half a minute in RagTime Solo. The upper left is a text frame, to the right is a spreadsheet frame, to the right of that is the graph frame linked to the data in the spreadsheet frame, and below that-a picture frame showing one of the San Diego Zoo's taller residents. You can move and resize frames as needed. And as you would expect, text can flow vertically and horizontally across multiple text frames just like the columns in a newspaper. The picture frame can accommodate nearly all the popular image formats, including GIF, JPEG, BMP, PNG, and the like, and RagTime Solo automatically resizes images to fit the frame. RagTime Solo can generate tables of contents and indices. The program is extremely intuitive to use and includes a short "First Steps" sequence to familiarize you with the program controls. Although documentation in PDF files is available, I so far have had no reason to open it. One of the ideas behind RagTime Solo is the re-use of information in multiple documents, and clicking the squirrel (yes, squirrel) button reveals the elements in your document as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: Sample Document with Inventory List Displayed
Nearly anything on the list can be dragged and dropped to other documents as needed. If another document uses different styles, those are replaced with the styles from the source document when you import a styles element. As Popular Science was quick to point out, the program does not support some of the typography tools found in other programs, such as tracking and darning. Personally, I can live with that. Although I'm not about to drop my beloved FrameMaker, I must admit that RagTime Solo has a lot of nice features-features that will hopefully be included in future versions of FrameMaker and other DTP programs. The included files, such as the Avery label templates, made it easy for me to design custom address labels in less than half the time the same task would take me using Microsoft Word. I highly recommend giving this program a try! To download RagTime Solo for yourself, click here:
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April 2005 |
President's Podium |
