Create Test
Portability of Create Page Layout
Using Create 5.1 in Rhapsody 5.1 for Intel

One of the most deceiving ways of testing any application that is designed to share content is by looking at the out put on the same computer on which it was made.

For example, I have made all these pages in Create 5.1 and posted them to the web and seen them on other systems that I have visited. This has given me a pretty good idea of just how portable Create's HTML would be. Had I not seen it on other systems, I would have to rely solely on how it looks in OmniWeb 3 (not exactly your typical browser).

But for page layout, I wanted to see how documents I produced looked on other systems. Fortunately I have a large variety of computers on which to test this out.

The Original
Well, we have to start some where. In this case, I made a page from information and images I had collected from watching the Saturn mission (I've done other tests using content from the Mars rover missions too). I place the elements in a mock layout which looks like something you could find in a magazine or book. I wanted to make sure that this was beyond just throwing text and images on a page, so I set up a background image and a light colored version of the body text shadowing the original black text.

The final layout is displayed in Create 5.1 in the screenshot below. This is on my IBM ThinkPad which is running Rhapsody 5.1 (DR2).

Moving Around
The first thing I did was use the Image Well to create an EPS document of the page (see the diagram below). I used the EPS format as I don't have a version of PStill on this system and I wanted something that would be pretty portable.

Once the EPS was ready, I moved it to my Power Macintosh 7100 (upgraded to a G3/266, currently running Mac OS 8.6). Once there I used Adobe Distiller 4.0 to convert the EPS to a PDF. After which I viewed the PDF in Acrobat 4.0 to see how it turned out. I was happy with the out put... but both Rhapsody and Mac OS 8.6 are from Apple, so I wanted a second example based on a non-Apple system.

Sitting right next to my 7100 is my SGI Indy. I moved the PDF I just made over to that system and fired up Acrobat Reader 4.0 to see if it still held the layout on a different platform altogether. And again (as seen in the screenshot below) I was happy with the results (note that my SGI only displays 8-bit color which is the main reason for the difference in color between the original and the version displayed here).

For me, this showed that I should be able to create complete documents on my Rhapsody systems using Create and be able to give them to other people with a certain amount of confidence that what they get on the other end is what I had intended them to see.