The ultimate horror for a desktop publisher using PageMaker 3.0 is the end of the year index for a series of newsletters. In most cases, embedded graphics and the design of the newsletter make it impossible to use a word processor to generate the index (if the original word processor can generate indices at all). So back to the tried and true methods of hand generation.

Sonar Bookends from Virginia Systems should put an end to that tedious chore, though. Sonar Bookends will automatically generate a list of every word in the document with the corresponding page numbers. That list can then be edited to remove words you don’t want in the index or table of contents. Alternately, you can provide Sonar Bookends with a list of words and/or phrases to index and save the time spent culling the common words from the master index. The advanced features of Sonar Bookends can create a multi-level index with an unlimited number of levels, create an index with chapter references with the chapters being in different files, and use boolean operations and wildcards in the index generation.

If you were wondering, and you probably were, supported document formats include: PageMaker, FullWrite Professional, MacWrite, MacWrite II, Microsoft Word, WriteNow, WordPerfect, Microsoft Works, Ready Set Go 4, text (Nisus files are text files so they are supported as well.), and MS-DOS text. As an added bonus, Sonar Bookends is A/UX compatible.

Virginia Systems has two other products, Sonar and Sonar Professional, that also generate indices, but they are general-purpose text retrieval utilities and are priced much higher than Sonar Bookends’ $79.95 list price. Sonar Bookends requires one megabyte of RAM and can run in the background under MultiFinder. We suspect that the speed with which Sonar Bookends generates the index or table of contents depends on the speed of Mac, but no information concerning the minimum or ideal system was mentioned.

Virginia Systems — 804/739-3200

[Editors’ Note: This information comes to you verbatim from Mitch Hall & Associates, the organizers of Macworld Expo.]

SHOW DATES

Wednesday, August 8 – Saturday, August 11, 1990

LOCATIONS

• Bayside Expo Center, 200 Mt. Vernon Street, Boston, MA 02125
• World Trade Center, 164 Northern Avenue, Boston, MA 02210
• Wang Center, 270 Tremont Street, Boston, MA 02116, (conference only, no exhibits)

SHOW HOURS (Exhibit Hours & Conference Hours are the same)

• 10:00 – 3:00 on August 8 & 11
• 10:00 – 6:00 on August 9 & 10

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

• Registration opens at 9:00 a.m. daily
• Cash only at the door
• No registration at the Wang Center
• Exhibits Only – $25
• Conference & Exhibits – $80. Conferences are on a first-come, first-served basis with no guaranteed seating.

PRE-REGISTRATION INFORMATION

(Pre-Registration coupons can be found in June and July Issues of MACWORLD Magazine or call (617) 361-1472 and we will send you a brochure which will allow you to pre-register.)

• Pre-Registration Deadline — July 10
• Exhibits Only – $15
• Conferences & Exhibits – $65. Conferences are on a first-come, first-served basis with no guaranteed seating.
• U.S. pre-registrations will be mailed their badges on or around July 24. All others may pick up their badges at the "Pre-Registration" counter in the Registration Area of Bayside Expo Center only beginning Wednesday, August 8.
• There are no group rates or student rates.

HOTEL INFORMATION

Several participating hotels are offering preferred rates to Macworld Expo participants. Call the hotel of your choice directly and mention Macworld Expo.

AIRLINE INFORMATION

American Airlines is the official airline. To receive discounted rates, call them directly at 800/433-1790, and ask for Star File #: S-0580AL.

EXHIBIT SPACE

Exhibit Space is sold out. If you would like to exhibit, please call (617) 361-8000 and ask for Christina Wood – she will put you on the waiting list.

Information from:
Mitch Hall & Associates
(via the News Notebook from All American Software)

Higher education met the Mac several weeks ago at the fifth annual Apple-sponsored MacAdemia conference. Some 800 educators and Macintosh enthusiasts gathered in Rochester, New York (USA) to view a variety of Macintosh demonstrations with an emphasis on the Mac in education. TidBITS editor Tonya Byard attended several sessions.

Professor Douglas L. Chute from Drexel University showed samples from a HyperCard stack that he projects from a Mac as a visual aid to his lectures. Rightly enough, he pointed out that hypermedia can be a valuable learning tool, but that the media must contain content as well as hype. He has designed his lecture stack so that it occasionally has a bit of glitz, but so that on the whole it provides a consistent, easy-to-use lecturing tool that is full of content.

Dorothy Mulligan talked about her college’s Project ISDN. At Jersey City State College, video conferencing with remote classrooms has become reality, using regular telephone wires to send real-time sound and video two-ways, between the classroom having the teacher and the remote students. Mulligan pointed out that the key advantage of using existing telephone wires was that the cost and mess of installing special networking cables was eliminated.

Robert Dwyer and Raymond Melcher, both from University of Massachusetts at Boston, demonstrated a prototype hypermedia archive for a collection of video tapes, photographs, and news articles concerning America in what Americans call the Vietnam War (We at TidBITS are unsure what the rest of the world calls it). The project (given time and funding) will integrate vast amounts of data. It will use what is called a videodisk jukebox, whereby a number of disks can sit in the jukebox, ready to play when called upon. Using HyperCard interface, researchers will be able to perform complex searches and take data away with them in the form of a laser printout, video tape, or audio tape.

Chris Espinosa, System Software Project Manager, from Apple, demonstrated system 7.0. We saw Helvetica TrueType functioning and many other features which at this point have been previewed ad nauseam in most computer magazines. The version that Espinosa had running did not crash and even performed as he said it would.

Information from:
Tonya Byard — TidBITS Editor

Last summer, Hewlett-Packard made an aggressive entry into the Macintosh printer market with its DeskWriter, a 300 dpi inkjet printer. As a substitute for the ImageWriter or as a compromise between a dot matrix and a laser printer, the DeskWriter works well. But with its slower speed and lack of PostScript imaging capabilities, the DeskWriter falls short of the LaserWriter IINT.

This summer Hewlett-Packard continues its efforts in the Macintosh arena with its introduction of an AppleTalk cartridge for several of the newer models of its LaserJet printer. For a long time now, you could attach a Macintosh to an HP LaserJet using third-party software drivers, but these drivers could not do PostScript for you. As of this writing, they still cannot.

To make a LaserJet print PostScript, you must first purchase a PostScript cartridge for the printer. We have spotted these cartridges available from Hewlett-Packard, Adobe, and Pacific Page, all priced around $500. These PostScript cartridges come with all the printer fonts found in the standard Apple LaserWriter set. Then, you must purchase the AppleTalk option from Hewlett-Packard, which comes with a software printer driver for your Mac and the appropriate screen fonts. And, finally, you must upgrade your printer’s memory to at least 2 MB, maybe 3 for comfort. All told, purchasing all these options is cheaper than purchasing a new LaserWriter, though that may change in July if Apple does release its $3300 Personal LaserWriter NT. Hewlett-Packard offers this option for its LaserWriter IIP, IID, and III. It is not available for any of the older LaserJets or for the LaserJet Series II. The cheapest of the bunch would be the IIP, which would carry a list price around $2960 with the requisite AppleTalk, PostScript cartridge, and added memory. Still not cheap, but closing in on affordable with standard discounts.

Hewlett-Packard offers more than just an attractive price. For those in a "mixed computing environment," though you have to plug and unplug the printer between PC-clones and Macs, it is works well in either environment, and depending on what you need to accomplish and what equipment you already have, this can be a big plus (although there are also ways to network PCs to Apple LaserWriters). In addition the LaserJet III looks exciting. It has a capability which Hewlett-Packard calls "Resolution Enhancement Technology." This capability allows the printer to use the extra processing bandwidth available in its 68020 CPU to think about the printout and fill in jaggies and small serifs on letters or small areas in designs with smaller-than-average dots. Hewlett-Packard claims that this gives a crisper printout and on initial examination, we were rather impressed with the output.

Pacific Data Products — 619/552-0880
Hewlett-Packard — 800/752-0900 ext. 1168
Adobe — 415/961-4400

Information from:
Tonya Byard — TidBITS Editor

Related articles:
InfoWorld — 11-Jun-90, Vol. 12, #24, pg. 24

Last week Farallon began shipping a voice digitizer that should make voice mail and voice additions to files an easy reality. Farallon’s new product, the MacRecorder Voice Digitizer, can be used to input voice messages to many Macintosh electronic mail systems, including QuickMail 2.2x from CE Software, Microsoft Mail 2.0, and WordPerfect Office Mail.

The new Voice Digitizer does not come with sound editing software and is targeted to people who wish to add simple sounds or voice to a Macintosh file. People who need sound editing capabilities will still find them in Farallon’s two-year-old MacRecorder Sound System, which comes with editing software and an input jack for sound from a stereo system. In exchange for its reduced functionality, the Voice Digitizer lists for $149, $100 less than the list price for the Sound System.

Voice mail is an exciting application for the new digitizer, but because its lower price may make it a realistic purchase for more people, we might find other, perhaps more interesting, types of applications accepting voice input. For example, FrameMaker (a desktop publishing application), when running on the NeXT machine (we’ve never seen it running on the Mac or any other workstation, so we don’t know if this only applies to the NeXT) has a facility for incorporating sound into files. The sound is represented by an icon which can be clicked to hear its message. This is handy for critiquing a colleague’s work on screen. If you didn’t like the design or wording, you could explain it verbally instead of trying to show it on the screen or writing a message. It is also handy for leaving messages to yourself and for hypermedia-like applications where the document is intended to be read online.

Farallon — 415/596-9000

Information from:
Farallon Press Release

Related articles:
InfoWorld — 11-Jun-90, Vol. 12, #24, pg. 41

Computers are fairly good about not using natural resources and not creating unnecessary waste products. In fact, one of the design features in our original conception of TidBITS was that it would never generate waste paper. By its very nature, it cannot properly exist on paper.

The main culprits in resource waste are printers, especially laser printers. Paper can often be recycled, but until recently the large amount of plastic and metal in toner cartridges could only be saved by having the toner cartridge refilled, which can cause some problems if it is not done correctly. We’ll hopefully have more on recharging in a future issue of TidBITS.

Now there is an alternative if you don’t want to recharge your toner cartridges and don’t have an easy place to sell them to. Hewlett-Packard will pay the postage for you to return the used cartridge to them. All you have to do is pick up a recycling kit from an authorized HP dealer and follow the instructions contained in it. HP will re-use some parts of the cartridges in making new ones and others parts, such as the aluminum drum, will be melted down and recycled as raw materials.

The project will run on a test basis from June 1st to December 31st, 1990 in 11 Western US states (including Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming), Germany, and Switzerland. HP hopes to expand the program to the rest of the US and Canada and more European countries in 1991. As an added incentive, for each cartridge returned, HP will donate 50 cents each to the National Wildlife Federation and The Nature Conservancy.

HP Technical Support told us that they would take any toner cartridge that can be used in an HP LaserJet printer, which includes cartridges that are used in LaserWriters. You would have to get a recycling kit from an authorized HP dealer though, but if you buy HP cartridges, a kit will come with new cartridges. HP should be commended highly for instituting this program, although in all fairness we must say that they are saving a bit of money on toner parts by paying only several dollars for postage for a used toner cartridge. Capitalistic quibbles aside, the program is very well-intentioned and we hope it succeeds.

Hewlett-Packard — 800/752-0900

Information from:
John at HP Technical Support — 800/752-0900 #3

Related articles:
MacWEEK — 12-Jun-90, Vol. 4 #22, pg. 14

We currently face a dilemma with TidBITS. We have found alternative sources of information so we no longer rely on the trade magazines much at all any more. The advantage to this is that it removes us from the grey area of misappropriation in copyright law. The disadvantage is that we cannot provide references to articles in magazines if what we choose to write about has yet to be covered in the magazines. So herein lies the question for you, our all-important readers, to answer.

Do you use the references provided in TidBITS to read related articles in the trade magazines?

We do intend to continue citing our sources (good little academics that we are) and including contact information whenever possible. We also hope to distribute an update stack several times each year that will update the items for which we have found references (we do keep track of new references in our master TidBITS Archive).

If you have an opinion on this subject, please tell us. You can reach us most easily via email, but snail mail is fine although it will take longer for a reply. Our various addresses are on the initial "About" card at the bottom under CONTACT INFORMATION.

Many thanks and we hope to hear from you. – Adam & Tonya