The New Print Shop
The New Print Shop is a printing program developed by Forte and Turning Point Software, published by Brøderbund and released for Apple II and MS-DOS in 1988. The application was a reworking of The Print Shop, an earlier printer program, and was later supplanted by Print Shop Deluxe. The New Print Shop used a semi-graphical user interface and allowed for the printing of posters, cards, and banners with custom graphics and fonts.
My family's first home computer was a floor model and it came with The New Print Shop loaded on it along with dozens of graphic packs. I played around with the program quite a lot, using its various printing templates, perusing the graphic libraries, and creating my own graphics. My brother and I used the banner feature a lot with our dot matrix printer.
Review
Good
- The interface and templates are very easy to use and customize.
- The program allowed for printing in ways that just weren't possible for many of the existing programs on the market at the time, like large graphics across multiple sheets of paper and even printing a document in reverse.
- There was extensive printer support.
Bad
- The printing was pretty blocky, even by the standards of the late 1980s.
- The basic program came with, at most, one graphics pack. This meant that you either had to buy additional packs, or be a really good artist to produce anything useful.
- There was no way to import graphics from other formats, so all art had to be made using the program's awful editor.
- Although the program supported color printing, the graphics were all monochromatic, so you could only choose single colors for entire sections of your layout.
- The printer my family had was not in the supported list, and each of the printers from the same company had the margins off a bit, so it never centered borders correctly.
Ugly
- The graphic editor was especially difficult to work with. It didn't feature simple 2D primitives like line, box, circle, or fill, so every pixel had to be colored manually which took forever. It also didn't have mouse or light pen support, so making complex art was very time-consuming.
Gallery
Title screen.
The main menu.
Setting up a poster.
Previewing a banner.
The graphic editor.
The quick print menu.
The printer configuration.
Download
This download includes disk images of The New Print Shop versions 3.0 and 3.2, The New Print Shop Companion versions 3.0 and 3.1, and the School & Business Graphics Library.
Links
