Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: fondpondforever on May 11, 2016, 09:53:05 PM
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I'm thinking about Using an Amiga with OS4.1 for daily work instead of a PC or MAC. By this I mean using it for your job such as word processing to bring in documents, digital art creation for making posters and leaflets for local events going on such as live music and the internet for communicating such as email and making websites. Your printed labels or slogan could say 'Made By Amiga'. :)
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Yes. They could.
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Are you doing this kind of work already and what software do you, or would you, use on a PC or Mac?
What system are you considering running OS4.1 on?
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I do abit of work down a Historic Tin Mine like writing notes and making posters/leaflet's for people locally. Use Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. Thought it would be interesting to use Amiga Software on a real amiga for this.
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You really do have too much time on your hands! If you are proficient in Photoshop and Word why mix it up? Photogenics and Amiga Writer 2 were my choices on the Classic 'miggy. Though for posters Pagestream 3 is my go to program. Pagestream 4 works on Amiga OS4.x. I guess GIMP and AbiWord would be the OS4.x equivalents of the other two programs.
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You can use Cinnamon Writer for word processing. It' currently freeware but the author accepts donations.
http://desler.be/modules/wfchannel/
There's a freeware drawing program called Mindspace which can also import bitmap art and can be used for DTP.
http://www.ast-workshops.co.uk/MindSpace/
There's also a free version of Andy Broad's painting program, Sketchblock. The current version is available via Amistore for about £13.
http://www.broad.ology.org.uk/amiga/sketchblock/
I'd recommend getting OS4.1FE Classic and setting it up under WinUAE emulation and have a play around with those programs to get the feel for using them to see if you think they would be sufficient for your needs.
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You really do have too much time on your hands! If you are proficient in Photoshop and Word why mix it up?
Some people enjoy the extra sense of achievement of doing something professional on Amiga. Years ago there was guy who wrote his own plotter driver and used an AmigaONE to print vinyl banners as part of his business.
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I only do a light amount of Word and Photoshop work on a day to day basis on my Windows and Mac PC's.
There's nothing that would even come close to it on my SAM. It's just not viable.
But that's just my opinion. I've got enough troubles getting an Amiga web browser to not puke while doing GDocs and the other Google cloud apps.
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I only do a light amount of Word and Photoshop work on a day to day basis on my Windows and Mac PC's.
There's nothing that would even come close to it on my SAM. It's just not viable.
But that's just my opinion. I've got enough troubles getting an Amiga web browser to not puke while doing GDocs and the other Google cloud apps.
Have you tried any of the programs I suggested? If they aren't up to your requirements the feedback could be useful for the developers.
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Some people enjoy the extra sense of achievement of doing something professional on Amiga.
And some people like to be productive. Hey-oh! :biglaugh:
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I do abit of work down a Historic Tin Mine ...
As long as it's just a bit of work. And it helps if your work is self-contained, i.e. you don't have to exchange files with others as part of a workflow.
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Seeing what people was able to do back in the days with only Amigas, Id say its more than possible to use only the Amiga for work.
But as people have hinted to, people have gotten so used to plug and play, 2 monitors and high speed processing with all kinds of programs, so using only amiga makes people think of Moses and stone tablets :P
I guess the best way of motivating yourself to actually go 100% amiga, is to disconnect your Wintel PC, put it in a box and put it in the basement.
Basically forcing yourself to do it. I guess it wont take long before you find out if you can do it or not. (Just dont risk the wrath of customers, if it leads to delivering a subpar product).
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Some people enjoy the extra sense of achievement of doing something professional on Amiga. Years ago there was guy who wrote his own plotter driver and used an AmigaONE to print vinyl banners as part of his business.
Amiga (any platform) is not suited for professional work, missing components like 64bit, memory protection or multicore support are the least problem, more problematic is missing drivers for 3rd party hardware like printers and expecially no up-to-date software. I would never even guess to use amigas for professional work, it is a nice hobby I waste some time on when I have some time left, not more not less.
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Seeing what people was able to do back in the days with only Amigas, Id say its more than possible to use only the Amiga for work.
But as people have hinted to, people have gotten so used to plug and play, 2 monitors and high speed processing with all kinds of programs, so using only amiga makes people think of Moses and stone tablets :P
I guess the best way of motivating yourself to actually go 100% amiga, is to disconnect your Wintel PC, put it in a box and put it in the basement.
Basically forcing yourself to do it. I guess it wont take long before you find out if you can do it or not. (Just dont risk the wrath of customers, if it leads to delivering a subpar product).
that would be the best way to become so frustrated that he drops amiga at all because he sees the difference ... :laugh1:
Productivity today is very much dependent on the software, most amiga software is stuck in the 90s for obvious reasons. One simple thing data exchange. Most amiga software cannot exchange data with modern platforms of course. If that would be possible it perhaps would be possible to use both Windows/Mac/Linux but it is not. How does he exchange data with a print office? I would guess they do not support amiga software there.
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I do abit of work down a Historic Tin Mine like writing notes and making posters/leaflet's for people locally. Use Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. Thought it would be interesting to use Amiga Software on a real amiga for this.
The kind of work you describe can easily be done on an AmiagOS 4.1 machine.
I use Wordworth 7 for wordprocessing, poster / flyer creation. Printing to postscrit them converting to PDF with Ghostscript.
(my PDFMaker script isavailable here http://www.broad.ology.org.uk/docs/amiga/proaction/05_A_Simple_App.html , realy ought to split that out of the tutorial an upload it to os4depot)
I use SketchBlock and ImageFX for graphics creation, saving the results inot 3 formats native (.skprj for further editing) , .ps for inclusing in Wordworth docs, and 24bit ilbm for previewing in wordworth (need imagefx for that). And ofcourse jpeg png etc for websueage where required.
Printing wise I have a HP laserjet Pro 200 color M251n which takes postscript data direct. This is important, don;t get any new printer that doesn't support postscript. You want a lasre for quality anyway, and all the other will lack somewhere in the driver chain.
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@OlafS3
How does he exchange data with a print office? I would guess they do not support amiga software there.
PDF, most printers ,in the UK anyway, prefer it. At least those that provide, CD / DVD cover, poster , flyer , leaflet printing services anyway.
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@OlafS3
PDF, most printers ,in the UK anyway, prefer it. At least those that provide, CD / DVD cover, poster , flyer , leaflet printing services anyway.
"PDF-Printer" on amiga or exporting PDF? I am not aware that this is possible but would do be interested. You can print as postscript file and this convert f.e. on windows but that is not amiga-only then. Another problem... at least the software I use to design "printable" documents supports different versions of PDF, not possible on amiga I guess.
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"PDF-Printer" on amiga or exporting PDF? I am not aware that this is possible but would do be interested. You can print as postscript file and this convert f.e. on windows but that is not amiga-only then. Another problem... at least the software I use to design "printable" documents supports different versions of PDF, not possible on amiga I guess.
Hum? You could do that with Amiga since ages - nothing AmigaOS 4.x specific. Most of my (past) productivity work with my 3.x setups generated Postscript - be it with Wordworth, Pagestream, Draw Studio or Final Writer. Pagestream can generate PDF out of the box.
There are tools and scripts which will make PDF out of this Postscript outputs - of course most (maybe all of them - I can't remember...:-)) need an installed Ghostscript (which is a standard part of all of my AmigaOS setups). Of course the PDF versions will be rather "ancient", but that should be no problem - even the newest Acrobat will read an v1.4 PDF ;-)
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So called "word processing" must be the most overrated "need" ever, so glad I don't have to deal with "office apps" neither in my work nor privately :)
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Everything was state of the art once.
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"PDF-Printer" on amiga or exporting PDF? I am not aware that this is possible but would do be interested. You can print as postscript file and this convert f.e. on windows but that is not amiga-only then.
Most of the DTP related apps I ever used on amigaos (which ever vintage) had Postscript print abilties, so does iBrowse IIRC and certainly the like of OWB do.
ImageFX can "print" to EPS, which is invaluable when used in combination with Wordworth as wordworth then passes the high quality EPS straight through, and does create it's own grayscale version.
I added this functionailty to print to PS / EPS Sketchblock to replicate that workfow, but you can also output direct to PDF via PIL. (Python Imaging Library)
AmigaOS has PS prnter driver that can also save psoscript direct to file, for printing from those apps that don't do postscript output themselves.
To convert to PDF simply use ghostscripts PDFWrite "device"
Another problem... at least the software I use to design "printable" documents supports different versions of PDF, not possible on amiga I guess.
I've not yet come across a situation wher the version of PDF I *created* was important. I have couple of times come across PDFs from else where that the current OS4 versin of ghostscript doesn't work on. I used linux to sove that hickup.
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I use Wordworth 7 for wordprocessing, poster / flyer creation. Printing to postscrit them converting to PDF with Ghostscript.
WW7's postscript output had some serious limitations IIRC, like all graphics (or was it just vektor graphics?) being limited to grayscale.
How did you solve the font problem? IIRC, you were limited to the fonts used in regular printers (I don't think I ever managed to embedd another font in a postscript file) and I never got WYSIWYG working because It was impossible (for me) to have the same (postscript) fonts used for screen output that were used in my printer...
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I am not aware that this is possible but would do be interested.
Converting Postscript to PDF is easy, Ghostscript can do that. Last Ghostscript port to OS3 should be slightly older than a decade, but that should be good enough for this particular job. Wordworth has no "export to Postscript" ARexx command,so you can't automate the process - but saving it as postscript and then manually converting the file to PDF works fine.
For Postscript output, FinalWriter might be the better choice though. I never used it, but allegedly it's got way better Postscript export.And you can easily automate the PDF export (http://aminet.net/package/text/fwrit/Convert_to_PDF).
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WW7's postscript output had some serious limitations IIRC, like all graphics (or was it just vektor graphics?) being limited to grayscale.
Actuall it's bitmap graphics that get converted to greyscale, but EPS files get passed through untouched, which is why I convert graphcs to .eps first as I mentioned above.
How did you solve the font problem? IIRC, you were limited to the fonts used in regular printers (I don't think I ever managed to embedd another font in a postscript file) and I never got WYSIWYG working because It was impossible (for me) to have the same (postscript) fonts used for screen output that were used in my printer...
Printer Settings Window->Postscript Settings SubWindow offers ths choice to download fonts (once , every time (which I think means per page), or never) I have that set to once.
Then you need to install a set of postscript fonts to work from, those that come with ghostscript are good start. You can't use compugraphic fonts, for postscript printing.
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Wordworth has no "export to Postscript" ARexx command
Yeah that a right PITA when come to scripting the process, I just save to set file name ram:ww.ps to simplify the later stages.
My PDFMaker script will scan the ghostscript statd.ps file and display all my custom page sizes I created over the years for odd things like custom sized adverts in magazines A5 with bleed for print shop flyers etc etc.
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Amiga (any platform) is not suited for professional work, missing components like 64bit, memory protection or multicore support are the least problem, more problematic is missing drivers for 3rd party hardware like printers and expecially no up-to-date software. I would never even guess to use amigas for professional work, it is a nice hobby I waste some time on when I have some time left, not more not less.
None of that was a problem for me when I did my school and college assignments on my A1200 in the late 90's. I used Wordworth, and the structured drawing tools were fantastic and the resulting prints professional in my opinion.
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Modern printers hardly have any need for dedicated drivers, they typically hand over a PPD when you install the printer unit in your OS, and you are set. But I suspect that the AmigaOS 4.1 printing system supports neither network printing nor PPD files.
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Modern printers hardly have any need for dedicated drivers, they typically hand over a PPD when you install the printer unit in your OS, and you are set. But I suspect that the AmigaOS 4.1 printing system supports neither network printing nor PPD files.
PDP support probably not, but network printer yes, there a couple of options.
With my hp200 M251N I honestly find it simplest to print to file and the ftp the file to the printer, its faster than going via the PS driver in pass through mode.
I did have it connected via usb too, but it confuses the usb stack when goes in and out of standbye mode.
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Have you tried any of the programs I suggested? If they aren't up to your requirements the feedback could be useful for the developers.
I have used them all. Notepad and MS Paint are better than any Amiga offerings, and that stings me as a guy who pre-ordered the A3000, A4000, and SAM.. Blender runs like crap, GIMP is worse yet, the only one I value is ADPro and it's a bit wonky on OS4. The modern gfx programs on the Miggy are not designed for production work at all. JUNK.
The word processors? I'd get laughed out of the print shop if I took pdf's into being mass printed, lol. CED on the other hand is a work of art, and has been since I found it in 1990 or so. But she ain't no Word Processor.
My advice is that these current developers quit gouging consumers for these dumb CLI essentials and magic, Dancing Bear, Fireworks screenblankers, and programs like CANDI and buckle down and get people USEFUL APPS. Office Suite, a good, solid browser, would be a good start.
I find it shameful I must pay for "utilities" that came with OS's going back 30 years ago? I simply cannot fathom why people tolerate this. People paying for bloody Multiview?
I run a telecomms business with 7 people on staff. My SAM is on my desk, right beside my Intel 5960 machine with 2 Titan X cards and 64 GB RAM. Yeah, I do some gaming at work :) I try daily, despite knowing how it'll turn out, to use my SAM as my daily driver. The results are always the same. Crashville.
I by no means expected the SAM to do everything that Windows box can do, but I hoped it and OS 4.1 could at least bridge the gap. It can't. The machine is relegated to being something I code on, and something I run a 1990 era BBS on. That's a hard pill to swallow, a $1500 machine that can't do much more than run Excelsior! BBS from 1990.
But every morning, hope against hope, I go to look at my daily job tickets on the SAM, and the Amiga web browser pukes at the most basic GDoc.
I find it a bit sad that Haiku OS or even RISC on the Pi is far more modernly functional than an OS that isn't exactly cheap, and the hardware to run said OS is extortionately priced. I can buy a Mac Pro for the cost of an X1000/X5000, and said machines can't do a darned thing more than my SAM due to software lackings.
Modern Amiga platforms are no further ahead than they were in the A4000 era, with the exception of decent TCP stacks and USB support.
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Modern Amiga platforms are no further ahead than they were in the A4000 era, with the exception of decent TCP stacks and USB support.
well, so far as modern platforms go, poseidon in combination with deneb was, and maybe still is, the more reliable usb solution than the one provided under os4 for several years.
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Most of the DTP related apps I ever used on amigaos (which ever vintage) had Postscript print abilties, so does iBrowse IIRC and certainly the like of OWB do.
ImageFX can "print" to EPS, which is invaluable when used in combination with Wordworth as wordworth then passes the high quality EPS straight through, and does create it's own grayscale version.
I added this functionailty to print to PS / EPS Sketchblock to replicate that workfow, but you can also output direct to PDF via PIL. (Python Imaging Library)
AmigaOS has PS prnter driver that can also save psoscript direct to file, for printing from those apps that don't do postscript output themselves.
To convert to PDF simply use ghostscripts PDFWrite "device"
I've not yet come across a situation wher the version of PDF I *created* was important. I have couple of times come across PDFs from else where that the current OS4 versin of ghostscript doesn't work on. I used linux to sove that hickup.
I have a software that is designed to create all sort of documentation and there you explicitly define which PDF-Version and lots of other things, all important for letting something accurate print. I am not a professional graphician doing print so I cannot explain it more in detail. For homeuse it is not that important but this thread is about using it instead of PC for doing work.
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@Duce
I'd get laughed out of the print shop if I took pdf's into being mass printed, lol.
So what format would you take you print shop? And what kind of shop / printing are you doing?
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I second Mr. Overflow and would go for an Amiga 1200 with the Vampire II when its ready for the system. It will be a super-fast classic setup with thousands upon thousands of utilities, games, music and other stuff to explore.
Amiga only? It does depend on what one use a computer for. My impression is that many people use their systems for accessing Internet to use social media, browse sites, not so much other tasks. If you have a tablet (iPad, Android), this could be a good substitute for this. You can do most general Internet stuff on those things like banking, shopping, Facebook, Twitter etc. Then you can use your Amiga for creative computer stuff. :)
I actually feel more creative when in front of an Amiga, be it classic or the AmigaOS 4.1 variant. I'm most creative without access to the Internet, because the "net" tends to steal my focus and energy and drive me to various forums, eBay, news and vids on YouTube. ;) When I'm on the PC it is even worse, because there I got Steam lurking in the background!