[Coco] Home Publisher - was Telewriter 128

[Rogelio Perea]

On 6/19/07, Stephen Castello <zootzoot at stephenrc.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 19 Jun 2007 22:45:06 -0400, mike delyea <mdelyea at gmail.com>
> had a flock of green cheek conures squawk out:
>
> >I would also be interested in obtaining a copy.  Also, does anybody
> remember
> >a desktop publisher for the coco?  I used to have one but can't remember
> the
> >name of it.  What I do remember is that it came with an example
> newsletter
> >that was about fairy tales, something like Wonderland Times or some kind
> of
> >pun on the wizard of oz or something similar.
>
> Home Publisher.  I don't remember what it came with.
>
> Stephen


Home Publisher came with a 'sample' page that had some fairy tale stories...
I remember one about Robin Hood and him having some 'tax' problems or
something like that. The whole page was rather amusing to read and for what
Home Publisher could do, the page showcased its capabilities quite nicely.

I used Home Publisher quite extensively back in those days. I had only 128k
in my CoCo 3 back then and a DMP-106A printer but it was enough to do a
school bulletin (no more than two pages) every two weeks. Home Publisher is
S-L-O-W in its operation... one of the main reasons I went to 512k as soon
as possible was to take advantage of some 'features' promised on
improvements to HP's operation with more RAM... it still ran slow but had a
coiple of things loaded into memory - can't recall exactly what but in the
end the software was a bit more manageable.

Home Publisher was a good idea shoehorned to work under OS9 in 128k RAM...
lots of compromises had to be made on the programming in order to
accommodate that, so the overall performance was disappointing at times. In
that school year (1990 or so), it was either HP on my CoCo 3 or the Newsroom
on a friend's C=64. The Newsroom was easier to navigate through but its
output was not pro-looking. Home Publisher's hardcopy was rather blocky (bit
mapped fonts zoomed up) but better than the C=64's Newsroom IMHO.


-=[ Rogelio ]=-