Ovation Pro: Questions before purchase

Hi all,

I’ve been playing with the demo version of OvPro on my pi, to weigh up whether it will cope with a reasonably complex book creation task. This is what I need to do:

1) A5 [tick]
2) Two columns on the right-hand page [tick – I think]
3) Text frame on lower quarter of both left and right pages, to contain footnotes. [Can’t see any footnotes in the software].
4) Numbered references within main text (columns on left-hand page), linking to footnotes spanning left and right pages.
5) A book running to around 100 pages, with this format.
6) Exporting to file format which a commercial printer will happily use, for a print run for publication.
The left hand page will contain an image, to be added by the printer, equivalent to the size of the right hand, above the notes frame.

These are my needs. I also have a very recent Easiwriter so potentially can use this for note generation, if it has sufficient flexibility and will allow me to extract these out and copy into OvPro.

Any thoughts on the above or anything which you think might be tricky or beyond its capabilities?

Many thanks in advance. If I feel suitably convinced and can get things to work well enough in my demo copy, will go ahead and purchase.

I use OvPro for making 4-col calendars and a charity newsletter; as neither are printed by me I supply PDFs to the printer (see below). As to your questions, A5 format is possible; double column text can be set up in Page-Edit Master Page by inserting text areas as required, and the ‘link’ tool (sixth down on the sidebar) can be used to control text flow. The same goes for footnote text areas. As to numbered references/footnotes I don’t have experience, but I believe TextWriter gives a lot more options for generating/inserting them, and if your page layout is simple and repetitive, you may therefore find TW the better option. Images are well handled in OvPro – does the printer need to insert them? It might be more straightforward if he gives them to you for insertion so you can provide a complete ready-to-print PDF file. As to creating these, Martin Wuerthner (www.mw-software.com) does a very good Postscript3/PDF printer driver, which you can set up in !Printers like any other printer driver. One advantage TW has over OvPro (if it really is necessary for the printer to insert images) is that you can save out in MS Word format and create an editable file. That said, the format used is very old (pre-Word 97 I believe). HTH, and good luck!

Thank you George for your in-depth reply, and apologies for the delay in mine.

Have been really impressed with OvPro’s linked frames and how easy it is to get it to do unusual text flows (independent columns for example).

From my research, OvPro can’t handle footnotes. I think the only way would be to create a frame for them, as you suggest, and use copy and paste them in from EasiWriter.

I’ve tried including the graphics into OvPro – which worked well until I came to print (PrintPDF as standard, no additional PS3 drivers). Even with a single graphic, the whole system dies (frozen mouse pointer, completely locked, need to do a hard reset). It looks like it’s running out of memory so am going to play with the memory slots etc. Otherwise, this will be a deal-breaker unfortunately.

Printing: it’s quite feasible to print graphics-heavy OvPro files – I do a 24-page four-col A4 calendar, a 96MB OvPro file, and roughly 1 Gig as a postscript file :-o!
AFAIK, you need to load a Postscript printer driver via !Printers to generate a PDF file. MW Software sells a suitable PS3 driver. See below for an excerpt from the PS3 driver Help file which hopefully will shed light on the process:
“PostScript 3 printer driver 1.20 (20-Apr-12).
Welcome to the PostScript 3 printer driver. This new driver offers many
improvements over the standard Acorn PostScript level 2 driver leading to
higher quality both when printing to PostScript 3 printers and when
creating PDF files using the PostScript printer driver and Ghostscript
(e.g., via PrintPDF or ps2pdf).”

I have occasionally had problems generating valid PDFs, and my fall-back procedure is to print to a Postscript file, using the above driver, and send that to Adobe Distiller on a PC for output to PDF. I’m not a fan of using PCs generally but Adobe Distiller /is/ more tolerant of PS glitches than PrintPDF, IME, and when all else fails…

Can you use a high quality JPEG?

The PS2 driver will pass on JPEGs but sprites will be rendered pixel by pixel. Actually it is either PrintPDF (unlikely) or GhostScript (likely) that is stiffing the machine. It can’t handle the inanity created by the driver.

I was able to get printing to work by increasing the “taskwindow memory” parameter (PrintPDF/Choices) to 8 megs. Had contact from the printer though who says they are happy to drop the images in, if I send them the PDF with the rest of my typesetting.

I have to say, I am hugely impressed by the Master Pages in OvPro. It works brilliantly. The fact that you can define Master Pages for each Chapter is a huge plus for me. I love the linked text frames.

I’m also playing around with the Contents applet, to see if I can get this to generate a suitably professional contents page.

The only stumbling block is the footnote issue. I tried generating footnotes in EasiWriter and then copying across, but unfortunately you get the note text included in the body text, with << >> brackets.

AFAIK, you need to load a Postscript printer driver via !Printers to generate a PDF file. MW Software sells a suitable PS3 driver.

The Level 2 PS driver that comes with RISC OS is also suitable, although it does have issues with graphics (as Rick says) and page sizes. The latter are fairly easily surmountable; the former less so.

Adobe Distiller is more tolerant of PS glitches than PrintPDF, IME

That’s surprising, given that PrintPDF just passes the generated PS data on to Ghostscript without so much as looking at it…