After a short break from these pages, FRANCO FREY makes a comeback and gets into the desktop publishing possiblities offered by THE ARTIST II - the utility written by Bo Janeborg during the creation of FAIRLIGHT II. He's impressed...

Back in September '85 Softechnics, a division of Softek International, launched a graphics package that seemed to make any other type of utility redundant. The Artist had some really excellent facilities which made it stand out from the crowd, but was sadly put in the shade by the launch of Art Studio from the now defunct software house, OCR. Art Studio brought a fresh whiff of Macintosh air to the Spectrum with the introduction of the mouse and window environment.

Softechnics have now come back with a vengeance, launching Artist II which combines the multitude of revolutionary facilities of the original with the now obligatory mouse-come-window technique. Artist II should mouse itself to the top of the league despite the strong contender, Art Studio, which is now marketed by Rainbird.

The cassette contains Artist II, the graphics designer program; Sprite & Font Designer - utilities to create (still or moving) sprites and fonts; Page Maker - the program which could have reduced Eddie Shah's loan requirements (and probably his colour resolution), and Screen Compressor, the Scrooge of memory.

First of all, the question of hardware compatibility; Artist II file handling copes with the Opus disk drive and the Sinclair Microdrive as well as the usual cassette recorder. Configuring to disk or Microdrive media provides access to features such as CATaloguing and ERASEing from within the program. Other interfaces may be accommodated, as Softechnics thoughtfully have a BASIC driver routine, that allows softies such as me to change the load, save and verify instructions to suit the specific hardware. In fact, in view of the review period, I even managed to save Artist II on Microdrive by altering the BASIC cassette load header.

Moving onto mice, Artist II will work either with the KEMPSTON or the AMX mouse. Less fortunate users will be pleased to know that Artist II happily can be operated from joystick or keyboard using Q, S and I, O keys for direction and N and M keys for setting/selecting or erasing. Joystick freaks without a KEMPSTON joystick interface can get their rusty old programmable interfaces out of the cupboard.

On the printer front, things are not so easy... Artist II is designed to work immediately either with the KEMPSTON 'E' printer interface or the Opus Centronics output of the disk drive. Strangely, Artist II seems to neglect the AMX mouse Centronics port altogether. Here comes my first and only gripe. Neither AMS, makers of the AMX mouse, nor Softechnics provide any useful information to the unfortunate user wishing to access the Centronics interface. This is more annoying since Softechnics have made it possible to modify a simple BASIC program.

Some help could have been provided in initialising the printer interface and setting up the correct printer commands. Perhaps a look at the competition wouldn't be such a bad idea - Art Studio allows you to enter the appropriate code to change the line pitch and set up the 8-bit graphics command; information which can be gleaned from the printer manual.

Having sorted out the hardware aspects, it's all song and dance. All functions are accessed via a mouse and window technique. Fixed origin and concatenated (LMLWD) lines, circles, ellipses and boxes are available in the selected brush mode and with and without fill routine. Drawing is accomplished according to the selected drawing mode, accessed in the MODE window. This can be set for mono work without affecting the attribute data in inverse, over or normal mode, either with solid fill or pattern fill, or in colour mode, with the preset colour choices.

There are three ways of changing colour. Selecting palette in the MODE pull-down menu provides for entry of ink, paper and border colour with choice of bright and flash. Similarly, pointing and clicking the colour swatch at the bottom right of the screen shows the same result. The last option is to use the keyboard: 1 and 2 for ink, 3 and 4 for paper, 5 for bright and 6 for flash. Different brush sizes can be selected by clicking the brush icon.

Thirteen brushes are available, including 8 square, 1 round, 2 italic slant, a spray can effect and a blank brush. The blank brush is useful for filling areas without hard edges. The brush patterns can be redesigned with the font designer residing in the EXTRAS menu. Painting and filling areas can be done by using any of the 28 patterns, which include a solid and blank pattern. Again, patterns can be redesigned. Up to six different fonts are available in text mode. Each font can be redesigned using the font designer in the EXTRAS menu. The brush designs are held in font 6.

Detail work is best dealt with using the magnify mode. The screen is divided into two areas, the normal-sized image on the left and the magnified image on the right. Pointing and clicking the mouse over the area to be worked on moves the magnification to that spot. In normal mode the screen is partly covered by the icon selections. Access to this area is reached by scrolling the screen up or down using the SCREEN menu. Full view of the screen is gained with the VIEW function. An UNDO function avoids any dramas of wrecked pictures due to silly mistakes. To avoid clearing wanted work it is best to OK the current state of the picture from time to time.

The STORAGE menu provides all the functions for saving and loading of screen designs and fill patterns. It also provides output to the ZX printer or dot matrix printer. Two different print sizes are available. Apart from the straightforward dumps there are also two grey scale dumps with stippling effect giving a mono representation of the colour screen display.

The two real beauties of Artist II are the CUT and PASTE and the WINDOW facility. CUT and PASTE provides the facility of cutting out any shape segment from the current screen or from a saved screen design and transferring it to any location on the existing screen. The cut-out can be scrolled into position, inverted, mirrored, turned, blended or mixed into the main screen. To help with the cutting out of the image there are circle, line and fill functions to tackle the most complicated segments to be transferred. Screens to be composed from any screen source on record.

WINDOWS provides a set of functions which manipulate a screen sector designated by a window boundary. Using the window icon a relevant screen area is framed and a number of functions are at your disposal to manipulate the specified area: this includes functions such as CLEAR, TURN (90 degrees), INVERT, MIRROR, SCROLL within the window and global setting of paper and ink colours. Special functions include THICKEN, which thickens lines and dots within the window area and OUTLINE, which outlines any change of ink and paper (excellent solarising effects). INSERT allows insertion of another screen detail from storage and is equivalent to the cut & paste option.

PAGE MAKER

Page Maker combines the graphic facilities of Artist II with the text facilities of The Writer to provide a modest Page Makeup system. Page Maker can handle a print area of 96 lines 64 characters wide which represents approximately an A4 page. Due to the restraints of the Spectrum screen the work is divided up into 4 blocks of two Spectrum screens side by side providing a scrolling display area of 24 lines by 64 characters.

To begin, load the text from a Writer file. Forward planning is required, as the text has to be laid out in advance in the correct position within the specified display area.

Page Maker supports up to 5 character sets called up via special font commands embedded in the Writer file. Similarly, special commands provide underline and inversion of text.

Once the text is in place, blocks of graphics can be inserted by creating window areas and loading previously generated screens. The graphics can be scrolled into the correct position and fixed. There is no limit to the number of graphic areas on the 2-screen block area. When satisfactory, the block can be output to the printer and the next block tackled. Each block can be saved to tape or disk/cartridge for later use.

SPRITE MAKING

The Artist II package includes a very useful sprite and font designer - Sprite II - which allows creation of up to 6 x 6 character square sprites. It provides the facility of loading a complete screen design and grabbing only certain areas for the sprite design. The sprites can be animated by displaying the individual sprite frames in sequence at various speeds, and the sprites can be mirrored, inverted, scrolled, thickened and outlined. Sprites can be finally saved as raw bytes for further programming.

A Screen Compressor is also included in the package, which reduces memory requirements for screen designs.

Summing up, The Artist II is the most comprehensive graphics utility on the Spectrum scene. The introduction of the mouse and window technique has improved its user friendliness, but keyboard slaves need not despair: operating the variable speed cursor without mouse or joystick is just as much fun. Artist II rightly deserves a CRASH SMASH!

YOU CAN BE AN ARTIST II!

A comic book drawn on the Spectrum, and all done on The Artist II from SofTechnics? Drawn by Phil South? Now I know you're kidding! Does it fill areas with textures? Does it cut, insert and paste? Does it us Windows Icons Mice and Pointers? Does it use your underpants to make soup? Well, dunno about the soup, but the other stuff's very likely.

FAX BOX
Product: Artist II
Publisher: Softechnics
Telephone: 01-831 1801
Price: £14.95

If anything's worth doing, as Steven Spielberg will tell you, it's worth doing a sequel to it. Not content with producing the artful Artist SofTechnics has now released Artist II. Although containing most of the familiar bells and whistles, like magnify, brush size, fill, line, box, circle and ellipse, Artist II now has a gallery of added features like an (eek!) mouse control option and cut, insert and paste tools! Look, I know this sounds like cosmetic surgery, but try to keep your mind on the article please!

There are facilities for grey scale dumping too, for those of us who don't have a ginormous amounts of dosh for a full colour inkjet printer. Compatible with most printers, it reproduces the colours in a picture as tones of grey, allowing you to print out as many black and white versions of your pic as you like. Golly!

Far from being a mere upgrade of Artist, Artist II is a unique new program in its own right. (Or should that be draw?) Although you can use it with the keyboard or a compatible joystick, the program really comes alive when you attach an AMX or Kempston mouse. This allows you to draw freehand where joysticks fear to tread.

CUTTING COMMENTS

The major improvement over the previous opus, and indeed over Rainbird's Art studio, is the Cut and Past tool. This tool is so important, that it touches every part of the program; you can cut an irregular shape from any bit of the screen, position it, and paste it down instantly.

You do this by selecting a work area and painting over the graphic you want with a fat brushpoint. You can then position the resultant copy of the graphic on the screen, and paste it down. What's more, the Insert Mode aSows you to cut and paste a section from any screen you have on tape, without losing the screen you're working on? As well as the improvements to the package, it comes with three graphic utility programs which you use separately from the main program, to extend its range of uses still further.

If you've got a yen for publishing, Page Maker will supply you with the technology. Loading ASCII text files from The Writer, (Artist II's sister word processor) and screen data from Artist II you can make up A4 pages ready for printing by mixing them together. Brilliant, eh? (Who needs an Apple Macintosh, anyway?)

The Screen Compressor is another useful utility; it takes your Screen$, which usually take up huge amounts of space, and crunches them down to a third of their size. This means you can load a lot of compressed screens into another part of memory, assign them a number and print them back whenever you want to, instantly.

Lastly, there's the Sprite And Font Designer. Not only is it a super fast font jiggler, but a full feature animated-any-size-sprite-handler too. Your sprites can be up to six characters square, and if they're small it can handle up 1073 frames of animation! Quite a shock, that. Almost an animated cartoon on its own!

Using the Page Maker, you could get yourself in print, with a newsletter, fanzine or comic, or even make your own greetings cards. With Compressor you could write a graphics adventure game, or cartoon adventure lie Red Hawk, switching screens Quickly in memory for different locations. And using the Sprite And Font Designer, you can make short animated cartoons, or 3D shoot 'em ups. The best bit about all of this is that you don't have to be able to draw! The juggling and editing of graphics mean it's easy for anyone to make good looking pictures.

COMIC CUTS

As you can see, the applications of a full function WIMP (Windows Icons Mouse Pointers) graphics package are many and varied. Not least of these is the computer-drawn comic book, like the famous Shatter, by American artist Mike Saenz. Mike uses an Apple Macintosh, and a paint program containing the same features as Artist II!

In setting out to review Artist II, I tried to think what I could draw that would really show off the facilities of the program, and be a new application for a draw program on the Spectrum. Then I remembered Shatter. Wouldn't it be fun to draw a comic on the Speccy, just to see if it could be done? it was a bit of a struggle, but here it is.

FINISHING TOUCHES

Artist II is a very good graphics package. On its own it would be pretty nifty, but the utilities you get with it make it hard to beat. If you bought Art Studio, you may even want to get Artist II too! There are enough extra facilities to make it worth your while, and the merging/cutting and pasting are second to none on the Speccy. It's probably a swell plan if you use them in tandem, taking the best qualities of both. If pressed to choose between them I'd say Artist II wins by a nose, but it's very close.

There were a few things that I found a little bit irritating, though. Sometimes when you select the brushpoints, the spaces between the different shapes were filled with corrupted code. Well, it's annoying, but not fatal. And another thing that struck me as odd - when I saved a picture, the program saved it, then when it returned to the program the picture had gone. It went to tape all right, but it was a pain to have to reload if you wanted to continue.

As you can see from this brief summary of its abilities, Artist II is a full feature, state of the art paint package with a string of possibilities as long as your brush. Now the features and power of the big graphics crunching computers can be yours. All this for fifteen quid. Amazing!

THE ART OF THE MACHINE

Dated has-been or all-time classic?

Bo Janeborg developed The Artist II while working on the sequel to Fairlight, an impressive and Smashed isometric arcade adventure. Its principal advance over its revolutionary predecessor was an ST/Amiga-style icon-driven control system currently supported by Datel, who offer the program, a mouse and interface for £49.95.

The first thing to say about the new program is that it isn't really all that new. The basic program is unchanged from the earlier version, except that it supports the +3 disk drive and printer interface. Nevertheless, The Artist II is a very powerful graphics program, offering many functions useful in creating screen displays.

One of the most interesting features of Artist II is that it comes complete with a 'Page Maker' program too. This allows screens created with Artist II to be combined with text written using Softechnics' word-processing program - The Writer (48K version £14.99, 128K version £17.99). Reviewed in CRASH 31 this was judged very impressive, and the two together give a form of Desk Top Publishing on the Spectrum +3 (both mouse compatible). You can even create your own fonts and fill patterns.

On loading (which takes about 40 seconds), The Artist II prompts for the AMX mouse - you can use either an AMX or a Kempston mouse (I was unable to test this option, however). Unfortunately it is quite easy to crash The Artist II back into Basic (doing a SAVE to a write-protected disk, for example. If the LOADER option was used, this will result in the loss of your masterpiece - so use LOAD 'DISK' from +3 Basic).

As well as driving Artist II by mouse, the keyboard can be used for all cursor movements - Q/S up/down and I/O left/right. 'M' is used to select options or set pixels, and 'N' to cancel options or clear pixels. You can also use a Kempston joystick (which I did for this review) but Artist II does not support the built-in +3 'intelligent' joystick. I occasionally found that control reverted to keyboard only, entailing use of the EXTRAS pull- down menu to re-select Kempston control.

All Artist II controls are handled using pull-down menus or by selecting one of the icons at the base of the screen. These include those for drawing empty or filled shapes - including circles. ellipses and rectangles. There is also a brush icon, calling up a display of assorted brush shapes of various sizes, for use when free-hand drawing on the screen. A scissors icon allows irregular shapes to be cut out of the screen display and pasted back elsewhere (quite complex to use, but very powerful). The magnifying glass icon allows sections of the screen to be enlarged for detailed work, and an A icon allows text entry and a dotted rectangle icon is used to set up (rectangular) windows.

At the bottom-right of the screen is the current colour and fill pattern - selecting either of these brings up a menu of colours. The pull-down menus, across the top of the screen, give access to additional functions - the STORAGE menu allows LOADs/SAVEs/CATs and screen dumps to be carried out. The TYPEFACE menu allows various fonts to be selected. And the MODES menu allows the way that other operations will function to be set (eg text can be laid down transparently, or in colour).

The SCREEN menu allows the full screen picture to be viewed, and either the top or bottom section to be displayed for working on (the menus & icons mean that three lines of the full screen are lost). There is also an OK option, which stores the current screen - if a mistake is subsequently made, the undo option will restore the OKed screen. A pattern option puts a chequerboard pattern over the picture, allowing attribute alignments to be made more easily.

The last menu option is the WINDOWS one - this allows a predefined window to be cleared, inverted, scrolled, moved or copied to a new position on the screen. There are also options to 'thicken' or outline the picture, and to re-scale the picture into a new size and position. If no window has been defined for the window has been closed) then any of these options will operate on the whole screen picture!

LOADing and SAVEing screen files is achieved by choosing the STORAGE menu, and selecting the appropriate option. A CATalogue is then displayed, and the SCREEN$ filename should be typed in - there is no chance to 'back out' here, and specifying a filename which is not a SCREEN$ can cause havoc! There is also an option to ERASE a file from the disk. One annoying problem here is that the disk motor continues to run after the disk option has completed and the Artist II display is restored - to stop this, do a disk CAT, and wait for the motor to stop before pressing the space bar.

Alternatively, edit the Basic program, and insert RANDOMIZE USR 14495 into line 2. This may also help other +3 programs which leave the disk running. The STORAGE menu also offers options to SAVE/LOAD fill patterns (which can be altered, along with the character fonts, by choosing options on the EXTRAS menu). There is also an OTHER option, which seems to do nothing - left in from the 128K version, and should switch storage to TAPE, but doesn't; and a VERIFY option, which simply gives a 'Nonsense in Basic' error message.

There are also four print options: large or small colour or grey scale. The Artist II uses the +3 printer port, but does not use the +3 dump routines - my printer, an ancient Epson MX80, could not print the Artist II dumps, even though normal +3 dumps are perfect.

Finally, the Page Maker option calls up a new list of options, selected (confusingly) by pressing a number 1 to 8. From here an A4 sized sheet of paper can be created bit by bit, using Artist II screen pictures, and The Writer text (up to 7000 characters). There are functions to cut out bits of the Artist II screen, and to 'flow' text around the pictures as they are fitted onto the page.

But you always have to be careful of LOADing a new screen picture when the EXTRAS up option is selected (which allows the bottom of the picture to be altered). Apparently this confuses the program - the new picture is loaded in the down-position, but the up option is still set. This can be sorted, by using the WINDOW SCROLL function on the whole screen.

Overall, The Artist II is a very powerful graphics package for the Spectrum +3, but it's a pity that after all this time the product wasn't more polished, with bugs eliminated and proper instructions for the +3. TheA rtist II can be purchased on +3 disk for £19.99 from Softechnics, 36-38 Southampton St, Covent Garden, London WC2E 7HE. Alternatively the Datel pack is available from Datel Electronics Ltd, Fenton industrial Estate, Govan Road, Stoke-On-Trent.

Label: Softechnics
Price: £14.95 (£17.95 128K)
Mice: Kempston, AMX
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Graham Taylor

The Artist II is not merely an enhanced version of Artist 1. It is now a complete suite of graphics utilities to let you do just about anything you could wish with visual images on the Spectrum.

There are three parts to the package. Artist II proper, which is a development of Artist 1, a sprite designer and a page make-up program.

The Artist was always regarded as one of the very best art programs for the Spectrum with only Art Studio from Rainbird a serious competitor.

Now the Artist II, quite apart from the additional programs must grab the lead as best Spectrum artist program bar none.

Some features of the original Artist program are retained intact. The guide grid of light and dark squares is retained. The assorted fill designs are retained as well as the option to design your own. Also retained from Artist 1 are the various brush styles, the magnify-an-area-of-screen option and the overall on-screen look.

So what's new? Most of the improved elements concern the way the program allows very sophisticated cutting and pasting. There are two ways of achieving similar results. There is the standard 'box' option where you use a cursor to set the opposite corners of a rectangular box. The section of picture framed by this box can be moved around the screen at will and even placed at right angles. This facility is easy to use and fast.

The clever stuff starts happening when you start using the outline Cut. This allows you to 'grab' a shape by closely outlining it. You are not restricted to box outlines but can choose any shape you wish. There are two restrictions (at least on the pre-production copy we had for review): it has to be used black-and-white to look effective and you cannot use it any other size. However, it is still a very sophisticated feature indeed, and becomes particularly effective when you are using discs or Microdrives where other picture files may be 'pilfered' for useful designs and shapes.

The usual intelligent features are included. When you Cut and Paste the window shape will, unless you tell it otherwise, always adjust in character squares so that your cut section of picture won't pose any attribute problems. Pictures may be overlayed for unusual effects or wipe out the old background.

The program is supplied with half a dozen or so assorted fonts for labelling and will work with both the AMX and Kempston mice. Apart from the small restriction on the 'cut out' facility mentioned above, the Artist II does, it would seem, just about everything that can be done on the Spectrum.

So, how about the other two parts of the Artist II package?

The page make up system allows for images created with the Artist to be mixed with text files created with the Softechnics' other utility. Writer word processor. This link is a sophisticated facility which should be of great interest.

The sprite designer has also been written by Bo Jangeborg (author of both versions of the Artist and Fairlight) and it is extremely sophisticated. Although, in the end all sprite/character designers come down to a grid of pixels which you switch on or off, where this one scores is in the amount of information you get about the design you are currently working on and, more important still, how that design corresponds with previous designs.

The sprite designer works a little like those flick books where the impression of animation is gained by flicking the pages quickly. The individual frames on each image are created using the usual icon/joystick off/on grid pixel system. The design can be seen both magnified and at actual size. Having created a series of designs you can then instruct the computer to flick between the images and see the final animated effect.

Bo has used this system to create most of the animation effects in Fairlight II - an impressive demonstration of the systems' power.

The Artist II has been designed, I would say, very much with mice and disc/Microdrive storage systems in mind and without these extras you might not want to up-grade from the original Artist but nevertheless this is a superb program - a serious tool in fact.

A 128K version is also available which uses the extra storage available.

BOTH THE ARTIST AND ART STUDIO ARE RE-RELEASED THIS MONTH IN ENHANCED VERSIONS, BUT ARE THE IMPROVEMENTS WORTH HAVING?

Softechnics
£14.95

I have mixed feelings about this program. It could - and should have been by far the best package of its type available for the Spectrum, but it seems to have been rushed on to the market without enough checking, and a handful of bugs have been allowed to take the edge off it. Some of them are just irritating things which don't matter too much - the storage menus are the wrong way round, so you have to select 'tape' to use Microdrive and vice versa; if you move the screen up to work on the part normally hidden by the icon menus, you have to scroll the screen after some options, because the bottom three lines are transferred to the top when you return to the normal viewing screen. But some other problems are much more serious. The SAVE/LOAD operations do not work when you are using the design font option. SAVE stores the wrong block of memory, and LOAD crashes the program! I have managed to find a way of getting round this (see footnote), but the deficiencies in the printing facilities have defeated me so far.

The handbook says that the program will drive an Opus disc drive Centronics interface or Kempston E. I am told that there are no problems with Opus, but with my Kempston E. only the grey scale screen dumps would work. The ordinary screen dumps and the Pagemaker printing option simply produced the required number of line feeds but no printing. It is especially galling to use the Pagemaker, an exciting facility which allows you to produce an illustrated A4 page, combining text produced by Softechnics' word processor, The Writer, with graphics produced by The Artist II. There you are, with your beautiful illustrated page on screen, and because the print option doesn't work, you can't get it on to paper.

AND YET...

But, despite the bugs, this is still a very powerful package. Developed from Softechnics' earlier success, The Artist, it now supports Microdrive, Opus disc or tape storage, keyboard or Kempston joystick, Kempston or AMX mice for control. The layout has been completely redesigned, and now has easy to use pull-down and icon menus. I am sorry to see that the facility to draw an are between two points is no longer with us, and that the keyboard cursor control keys are still letter keys rather than the arrows, but the extra facilities the program now has are tremendous. There are now elastic lines, circles, ellipses or rectangles, and shapes can be drawn in outline or ready-filled with the chosen texture. There are 28 textures available, and all are redefinable and can be saved or loaded. The fill option is as efficient as ever, and the enlarge option, for detailed work, far better than in the old program. The enlarged window is shown alongside the same area in normal size so that the effect of changes can be seen as you work.

For lettering, the program comes with five fonts. These are redefinable, but you would be well advised to confine your modifications to fonts 3, 4 and 5. Font 1 is the Spectrum character set, and being held in ROM, ignores all your attempts to modify it, though the font designer gives the impression that you are making changes. Font 2, the small typeface, is used extensively by the program. I discovered the hard way - the handbook does not warn you - that inverting it makes the menu cursors invisible and mirroring it makes the menus unreadable. It was virtually impossible to get back to normal without reloading the program.

CUT 'N PASTE

The window and the cut and paste options are the program's great strength. A rectangular window of any size (corresponding to the character squares) can be defined anywhere on screen and the area within it cleared, moved, enlarged or compressed, rotated, inverted or mirrored. The design can be thickened or outlined, attributes changed, or the image scrolled. Cut and paste has some of these facilities, but any size or shape of area can be manipulated and, whereas the window option only allows portions to be moved in character-square jumps, the scroll option in cut and paste allows placement to pixel accuracy. Both window and cut and paste have an insert mode which allows a second screen to be loaded, and portions of it cut and inserted into the current artwork. The ship in the illustration was cut from one of the demo screens supplied with the earlier Artist program, and inserted into the seascape drawn with this one. This is a very powerful facility, allowing you to build up a screen library and bring bits and pieces of several screens together in a new one.

There is now a separate sprite designer, which has normal sized and enlarged screens upon which sprites up to 6 x 6 character squares can be designed. They can also be 'grabbed' from existing screens and inserted into the present one. Sprites for animation can be designed and stored in a sequential file - up to 79 screens 3 x 3 square size, less for larger. To test animation, the speed and frame numbers are selected and the animation is demonstrated on the normal size screen. Sprite files can be saved with their frame information - for reloading into the designer - or as a string of bytes for use in other programs.

Is The Artist if a good buy? Well... if you have an Opus disc drive, or are not particularly interested in screen dumps, yes. You will not find a better or more powerful screen art program than this one. But if, like me, you use screen dumps a lot, you might find it disappointing. I would like to think that SofTechnics will do some more work on it and issue a Mark 2 version without the bugs, driving the interfaces it is supposed to drive, and with a better handbook than it now has. The present one is rather sketchy - you almost have to read between the lines to discover the full potential of some of the program's options - and it has too many printing errors. Dare I also suggest that a free tape exchange for those who bought this flawed version would be a nice gesture? But certainly, SofTechnics should take another took at it. It is far too good a program to be left in the state it is now.

CAROL BROKSBANK REVIEWS THE NEW 128 VERSION OF ARTIST II, AND THE DEBUGGED 48K.

Good news from Softek! You may remember that when I first reviewed THE ARTIST II in February, I commented on the bugs in the program and said that Softechnlcs really should take another look at it. Well, I am pleased to report that they have done just that. The 48K version has been re-issued without the bugs, and is now the really splendid program it always promised to be.

It has all the screen drawing facilities that you would expect - elastic lines, filled or unfilled shapes, alternative typefaces, freehand drawing, keyboard, joystick or mouse control, enlarged areas for detailed work, font and sprite designers, numerous and re-definable fill patterns. But the three features which lift this program head and shoulders above the opposition are the window option, cut and paste, and the Pagemaker.

The window option allows a rectangular window, of any size from one character square to the full screen, to be defined. The graphics within it can then be manipulated - turned, inverted, enlarged or reduced, copied to another part of the screen, mirrored, outlined or thickened. The window can be scrolled, and attributes reset. But the really exciting feature is the insert facility. A second screen can be loaded into memory, then scrolled around in the window area, until the required section is within the window. The graphics from the second screen are then copied into the current artwork. The window option only allows areas corresponding to the character squares to be manipulated, and movement about the screen is in character square jumps. To cut irregular shapes, or work to pixel accuracy, the cut and paste option is used.

Here you can draw a box, circle or irregular shaped line around the exact section you wish to work on. and then move it to the new location, turn, mirror or invert it. It can be ANDed, XORed or ORed into the new position. This option has the same insert facility as the window feature, so that pieces can be cut from a second screen and inserted into the current artwork. The scroll option in cut and paste moves in pixel steps, so that the final placement can be absolutely precise. The illustration of typefaces shows some of the effects available by using these options.

PAGEMAKER

The third unique feature of Artist II is the most exciting of all. This is the Pagemaker, a page layout facility, which enables you to combine text and graphics and print an A4 page. The text, which must be produced using THE WRITER word processor, forms the 'skeleton' of the page, which can hold 96 lines by 64 columns of text, or up to eight full screens of graphics. A full screen occupies 24 lines x 32 columns. When the text is being typed, spaces must be left where the graphics are to be inserted. Any size illustration, from 1 character square to a full screen, can be used so the layout must be carefully planned at the word processing stage. There are five type faces available which are selected by inserting control codes into the text, as are underlining or inverting. The finished text is saved, and then loaded into the Pagemaker.

Pagemaker divides the page into four blocks, each capable of holding two full screens side by side. You can scroll across the block to read the full width of the page. A graphics screen is loaded into memory, and a window defined on the block where the illustration is to be placed. The graphics are then scrolled to bring the correct portion into the window. When all the illustrations in the topblock are in place, it can be saved and/or printed, and the procedure repeated for each of the other four blocks. The resulting page is very attractive, (see illustration).

If you wanted to print multiple copies of a many-paged document, this could all be a bit tedious, especially if you save to tape, because four separate blocks must be loaded and printed one after the other to produce each page. However, if you are using microdrive or disc, a FOR-NEXT loop could easily be written to print several copies of a page, loading each block and printing it automatically.

The illustration shows the other application of the Pagemaker. If you want to make a large illustration, covering several screens, it is virtually impossible to print several ordinary screen dumps on the same page and line them up with the pixel accuracy necessary to make a single picture. Several dumps pasted together had been my solution until now, but this program makes it possible to put up to eight screens together accurately and produce one printout.

The handbook says that the printout will fill the page, and any margins must be left within the text area. However, with my combination of Kempston E interface/Epson RX80 printer, this is not so. There is just the right margin on the paper using the full 64 columns, but the problem is that it is all on the right hand side of the page. I discovered that this can be overcome if you go into BASIC, poke 64005-64010 (inclusive) with 0, and enter.

LPRINT CHR$ 27; "1"; CHR$ 6;

as a direct command. (Make sure this is the Pagemaker you are working in, not the main program, before you do this!) The illustration shows the layout this gives you.

If you are looking for a 48K graphics package, then my advice would be to look no further than this one. The new 128K version is exactly the same as the 48K, except for the Pagemaker, which is even more powerful.

128

In the 48K package, Pagemaker is a separate program. In the 128K version it becomes an option of the main program, accessed from one of the pull-down menus. You no longer work on the page in four separate blocks. The whole page is available and the screen is scrolled around it to view various sections. The text is prepared in the same way as for the 48K version, but the graphics screen holding the illustration is loaded into the main program. A whole screen can be inserted straight into the page, but where smaller portions are to be used, a screenful of the Pagemaker page is 'grabbed' into the main program, and the window and cut and paste options used to insert the illustrations. The portion is then replaced into the Pagemaker.

In the 48K Pagemaker you can only bring prepared text and illustrations together, but the 128K version allows you to modify both text and illustrations, perhaps enlarging header text to make a 'headline', modifying an illustration or even drawing a new illustration direct into the page. There is a useful preview option, which gives you an overview of the page layout. It is too small to read the text or reproduce the illustrations properly, but the blocks of text and illustration shapes are shown. You can see whether, for instance, you have centred an illustration on the page, which can be quite difficult to judge when scrolling around the full size page.

The whole page is saved and printed automatically in the 128K version, which makes it a much more viable proposition for 'desktop publishing', though it would still need a patient soul to contemplate producing 100 copies of a 20 page document by this method. But for a leaflet, or a short report, and a limited number of copies, it is a great step forward for the Spectrum.

If, like me, you use a Kempston E interface you cannot, of course, print from 128K mode. Fortunately, the full page is saved in the four blocks which are compatible with the 48K version, so I find it worthwhile, since I do a fair bit of this sort of work, to own both versions. I prepare the page in 128K, taking advantage of the extra facilities, save it, and then print from 48K.

Even if you do not wish to produce a printed page, the ability to hold eight full screens in memory at once, and scroll around them freely, will be very useful to anyone preparing screens for a games program.

The final verdict has to be that this is the most advanced graphics package available for the Spectrum. Its compatibility with THE WRITER, with the promise of THE FILER to be coming shortly, must surely mean that this will be the top Spectrum business suite.