NeXT's ship comes in on wave of publishing products

San Francisco Ð For years, NeXT has exhibited at trade shows in a booth designed around "waves" of demonstration stations. At this year's Seybold show, there really was a wave of new (and in some cases, shipping) publishing products.
Page layout
Pages showed its document-processing application running under NeXTSTEP 3.0 and NeXTSTEP '486 in its own booth. Pages by Pages, including four design models, will sell for $795 in Q1 of 1993.

Archetype introduced Stylist, a proof-of-concept app for its Document Engine technology. Stylist will ship with the DE in the first quarter of 1993 for $795. Frame Technology announced FrameBuilder for developing structured documents. The NeXT version of this multiplatform product will ship in the second quarter of 1993. RightBrain demonstrated PasteUp in the NeXT booth.

Draw/Presentation/CAD
Create 3.0, from Stone Design for $495, offers Wacom tablet support, multilevel undo, universal EPS use for pattern fills, an autotrace feature, and layering capabilities.

Graphisoft was expected to release TopCAD in October. Priced at $1995, the 2-D CAD program offers all the selection, layering, and generation-modification tools found in the Mac version. A command and macro language will be added later.

Altsys Virtuoso shipped in October. The $695 drawing program offers a full suite of drawing, layering, text-handling, and color-separation tools for single-page documents. Lighthouse Design released Concurrence 1.1, an updated version of its$995 presentation program that improves printing performance, especially with imported TIFF and EPS images; and the $499 Diagram 2.0, which sports lots of new features: rotation, image cropping, easier label placement and tool selection, copying and pasting styles, more intuitive rulers, and infinite undo.

Multimedia/Music
MusicScribe, a music-notation program from RightBrain, is expected to fill the gap left when Coda decided against releasing MusicProse.

PagetPress Electronic AppWrapper, the CD-ROM version of the popular catalog of goods and services for the NeXT, was shown. It goes beyond its printed counterpart to include working demos of many of the products included in the catalog.

Prepress/Scanners
Goldleaf began shipping eXTRASCAN, a $450 driver for the high-speed Epson GT-8000 scanner, with other high-speed scanners to be supported soon; eXTRACOLOR, a $995 color-correction and separation package available to any NeXT application through the Services menu; and eXTRACAL, $2995 color-calibration hardware to allow correction of the NeXT monitor to any output device through eXTRACOLOR.

Varityper's Image Manager uses the NeXT as an image server in a Mac environment. Canon showed its previously reported solution for using the NeXT as a front end for the Canon Laser Copier products.

Utilities
Bacchus's Image Agent lets users drag and drop non-native image files into graphics apps. The program transparently converts a host of formats, including those from PCs, Macs, and Sun workstations. Bacchus: 310/820-9145.

TypeDrawer, from Imaginet, lets users install fonts by dragging and dropping and manage font-family groupings and availability. Users can organize fonts by document or project, for example. Imaginet: 612/342-2442.