From: djs@jet.uk (David J Stevenson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Calligrapher: Don't expect any support.  (flame)
Date: 12 Oct 92 13:55:54 GMT
Organization: Joint European Torus

Given the ineptitude of the kid attempting to demonstrate Calligrapher when
I went to Silica Systems in London, I bought the package largely on the
recommendations of advertisements (!) and ST User magazine (just as reliable
a source of information as the adverts...).

As it turned out, I was pretty pleased with the package, except for quite a
few minor bugs in the PostScript output, and a couple a major ones too (for
example, when a letter O was plotted, the inside part was filled in with the
same colour as the letter was drawn; a bit like the way scribblers blob
letters).

Working Title is the UK distributor, and appears to be a one-man company run
by the author of Calligrapher, one Mr N P Johnstone (he's the only person
that answers the phones there).  After he assured me that there are no bugs
in the Postscript driver, I sent him the files to prove that there were.  By
return I got a letter stating that there were in fact bugs (which I already
knew of course), but that most of them would not be fixed.  Despite my
protestations that these bugs were important, he said that *he* was happy
with the output, so that was that.  He even told me how another user had
made similar complaints, and that he would not be making fixes for him/her
either.  He then went as far as to suggest, when I pointed out how these bugs
showed up in the Calligrapher Gold manual itself, that I was a bad judge of
these things just for finding the errors. (I can't quote *exactly* from memory,
but it went something like "You've found these errors, and therefore you focus
on them, and don't see that other parts of the document don't have errors, and
therefore think the errors are important...").

One other major bug is that, where the printer has no built-in font to match
that being printed, and Calligrapher has to render the font via PostScript
line drawing commands, some coordinates are several pixels out, giving a jerky
outline to characters, and an effective resolution of MUCH less than 300dpi.
Mr Johnstone said that there was no way he would consider fixing this!

I even ended up disassembling and patching the driver manually to fix some
of the incorrect character mappings (eg apostrophes were printed as cents).

Calligrapher is basically almost good enough to recommend, unless you expect
any support.  (I bought Calligrapher Gold, which is the next step up from
Calligrapher Professional.  The lack of support and obviousness of a few of
the bugs reminds me of a comment made in Sound-on-Sound magazine, where they
said that anything with Professional in the name is clearly for amateur
use only!).

Anyone wish to comment?  How responsive are the US distributors?

-- 
+---------------------------------------------------+
| David Stevenson  djs@jet.uk   Tel: +44 235 465028 |
+---------------------------------------------------+
- Disclaimer: Please note that the above is a personal view and should not 
  be construed as an official comment from the JET project.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st