Ovation Pro is now free (v2.78g)

Not sure if this is the correct place to post this, but here goes.

Just over from Twitter, Gavin Crawford drew my attention with this tweet:

https://twitter.com/GivvyGavvyGoo/status/1551947457818411011

A further bit of digging lead to the following post from David Pilling on the Ovation Pro mailing list archive:

https://www.freelists.org/post/davidpilling/Ovation-Pro-278g-for-RISC-OS

David Pilling has released v2.78g of Ovation Pro, which removes the requirement for registration of the software. This marks the end of Ovation Pro as a piece of commercial software.

As it now effectively free, what efforts would be required to get Ovation Pro included in the official distribution build? This would be a serious bit of DTP kit to add to the Pi.

Thanks to St Pilling for the amazing gesture.

David Pilling has created and maintained one of the most important pieces of software on RISC OS. It is fantastic that he has done this for so long. Thanks for all your work and enjoy the future.

If this is true, I’ll give Ovation Pro a spin. It might even tempt me back to DTPing in RISCOS – if it succeeds in doing that, it’d definitely be something I’d be happy to contribute a voluntary payment towards. (This is something I’ve been very reluctant to do for the last few years, on a rather limited income. Income is still rather limited, but we’ve just sold a house in the south-east of England, and are living in a far cheaper bit of Scotland…)

Not yet found a link to anything other than a free upgrade.

It is true. David is putting together a downloadable package for OvationPro. The source code will be released separately.

When I migrated from Impression Publisher Plus to OvationPro (some decades ago), it took a while before I could find all the new features blindly. And although I still slightly prefer some of the approaches of Impression (masterpage handling), OvationPro has so much more to offer in such a flexible way, that I can’t imagine how I would do without it. Give it a try Clive…

I much prefer OvationPro to Impression. The look and feel clicks more with how my mind works, and the script language is useful.

As happy as I want to be for this, and it’s a massive thing for the community….I can’t help but feel that this is also the end of an era.

Let me just take a moment to thank David for all his efforts since the first days of RISC OS. Just try to imagine no SparkFS, no Hearsay, no ArcFax, no Ovation/Pro…. it’s unthinkable.

(insert lots of handclap emjois here)

(insert lots of handclap emjois here)

Hear, hear!

Give it a try Clive…

I certainly will. I’ve not done DTP on RISCOS for 25 years, not since leaving the Physological Society publishing office where we used Impression Publisher. At ARM, it was FrameMaker on PCs. At home, I’ve used LibreOffice, and before that OpenOffice – some big documents (novels) and lots of small ones, but very simple page layout. Interesting to see how I take to Ovation.

I?ve not done DTP on RISCOS for 25 years

DTP is one of the several reasons I’ve stuck with RISC OS up till now. IMHO the RO GUI particularly lends itself to on-screen page design and layout (and before anyone asks, I have used QuarkXpress, Illustrator and Photoshop on Macs, as well as Word and Publisher on PCs). Impression was revolutionary in its time, but OvationPro is very capable, and has been my DTP software of choice for the last twenty years or so.

At ARM, I didn’t get a choice. There are lots of ways it was a comedown moving from Impression Publisher (with a lot of my own software, written in BBC BASIC & ARM assembler, in support) to FrameMaker – but in other, important, ways, FrameMaker was a lot better. For the journals we were doing at Physiology, Publisher (plus my little apps) did everything, with far higher productivity, and most importantly, allowed me to match CUP’s typesetting so exactly no-one could see the difference. But for what we were doing at ARM, FrameMaker was far more capable.

At home, I’ve not really done DTP at all – advanced word processing would be a more accurate description.

advanced word processing

It’s more than capable of that. If you don’t need arbitrary frames with text reflow around, just don’t use them. ;)

The only reason my “novelette” (that I’ll finish one day…) is written using Google Docs is that a lot of the start was written in the waiting room of the scanner, while mom had unpleasant things done.
It is, however, particulary frustrating and at times downright annoying (the app can only do a fraction of the things the web version can do). Oh, and web preview, app preview, and final PDF can have some fundamental differences in layout.
For a company with the wealth and capabilities of Google (not to mention their infamous job exam), it’s utterly ****ing embarrassing. They should be ashamed to release something that poor. I suppose the only saving grace is that it’s a Google product they haven’t yet knifed in the back.

If I had had a RISC OS laptop, it would have been done on OvationPro and the page layout would be simple and to the point and what it looked like on screen would be what the final PDF looked like.
Something the original Ovation had sorted in 1990, and yet the world’s second or third largest tech company (that created the most popular mobile ecosystem ever) still cannot get right…

But, alas, I had a freebie tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard and four hours to kill each time…

If you don’t need arbitrary frames with text reflow around, just don’t use them.

Oh, LibreOffice is perfectly capable of that – as of course is Publisher. I don’t use them often in my novels, but I did in The Reminiscences of Penny Lane, which includes a lot of photographs. Going Forth and Exile each have a few drawings, but the text doesn’t flow round them.

The only reason my “novelette” (that I’ll finish one day…) is written using Google Docs

Surely you can export it in a format that’ll import into something more comfortable now?

Surely you can export it in a format that’ll import into something more comfortable now?

Probably easiest to copy-paste the entire block of text and reformat it from scratch (currently, what, 97 pages?).

Docs claims to support Word, PDF, OpenDocument, plain text, RTF, web page, and epub…
…however I know from experience that RTF and epub are fundamentally broken.

Plus, for the moment, trading off annoyance with accessibility, Docs is still pretty much the only cross platform/device option.

Speaking of which, OvationPro has a Windows incarnation, which looks and feels just like RISC OS (except it can do Unicode, and cope with a wider variety of image formats). Useful cross platform DTP!

Useful cross platform DTP!

LibreOffice works seamlessly between Mac and Windows, but obviously not RISCOS. It’s not really DTP, but I don’t know whether I’ll ever really want anything it doesn’t do. Sadly, although it can load and save Microsoft Word formats, the compatibility isn’t 100% – but then, that’s true of different versions of Microsoft Word amongst themselves anyway. That’s only important because many of the people I’d want to send files to use Word not LibreOffice 8~( but mostly sending people PDFs is what’s wanted.

A Windows incarnation of OvationPro is not relevant to me – I’ve evicted the last vestige of Windows. But I’m certainly interested in giving OvationPro a try on RISCOS – I presume it can output PDFs?

I presume it can output PDFs?

Yes, no, maybe.

It uses the RISC OS printing system. So for regular characters, the PS2 driver linked to PrintPDF will do the job (but use JPEGs or DrawFiles, not sprites).
Better results with the PS3 driver, but that’s a commercial offering.

This was entirely created on RISC OS using OvationPro, PrintPDF, and the standard driver: https://riscos.fr/frob31/

I wonder what its file format is like, or what formats it can load and/or save…

Back in the 1990s most file formats were decipherable, and I was able to write a general purpose conversion app* that accepted files from almost any word processor and produced a DDF file for input into Impression or Impression Publisher, mostly with the appropriate styles for the target journal, saving our production editors a hell of a lot of work. Most file formats these days are too arcane for that to be as easy as it was back then. (And I’m older & maybe not quite as sharp as I was – I reckon my brian’s not in bad nick, but I’m 72 not 40-odd…)

OvationPro would be most useful to me if I could do something like that to transfer work between it and something on the Mac.

* Mostly in BASIC but with critical bits in assembler – for speed, so these days I’d probably just use plain BASIC.

OvationPro can save it’s own custom binary type, and it can also save a script description of the document.

Of course, it can load both.

A long time ago, I wrote an HTML import filter for OvationPro ( http://heyrick.eu/software/ovhtml.html ) which tried to strip a document of roughly HTML 3.2 era into an OvationPro document script which would then be loaded.

I think my teletext software could also save stuff as an OvationPro document script?

User guide for Windows version is here – https://www.davidpilling.com/cd/docs.html

It should be more or less the same as the RISC OS version.

it can also save a script description of the document. Of course, it can load both.

I suspected this. And of course it’s exactly what I wanted to hear. Coming up: conversion apps to and from LibreOffice… but don’t hold your breath…

So for regular characters, the PS2 driver linked to PrintPDF will do the job (but use JPEGs or DrawFiles, not sprites).
Better results with the PS3 driver, but that’s a commercial offering.

The WROCC has been produced using O-Pro, PrintPDF and the PS3 drivers for about a decade; prior to that, it was using PS2 (although the issues in the Back Catalogue may all have been re-built with PS3 at some point – I can’t remember).

For other platforms, the results are fine; for viewing on RISC OS, careful selection of fonts is required if it is to look at all good in PDF (in effect, “stick to the ROM fonts”). To be fair, though, that’s more of an indictment of our woeful PDF viewer than it is of the capabilities of O-Pro.

The PS2 driver is less good with sprites, as Rick says, and with fonts that aren’t mapped to PS equivalents (IIRC; it’s been a while since I’ve used the PS2 driver).

Who was trying to collect old RISC OS application in a GitHub repository? Paolo?

David as a lot of useful retired applications that could be added to it.

David as a lot of useful retired applications that could be added to it.

Aha! I was wondering why the recent(ish) SparkFS update came as a full app instead of the usual “Freshen” app to update an existing one. That would explain it :)

As for Ovation, I’ve never used it myself but I might have to give it a go!

PS3 is much better than PS2. As PDF is the only format I know guaranteed to render a RISC OS-generated file legible on iPhone, iPad, Windows PC and Mac etc etc, I feel the GBP35/Euro40 asked by MW Software [http://www.mw-software.com/software/ps3/ps3.html] to be money well spent.
As for free PDF viewers, I have found MuView [https://www.riscosports.co.uk/As] to be commendably accurate. However, it doesn’t offer a ‘Print’ option.

Great news about OvationPro!