Difference between revisions of "The New Print Shop"

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[[Category: Graphic Software]]
 
[[Category: Graphic Software]]
 
[[Category: Printing Software]]
 
[[Category: Printing Software]]
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[[Category: DOS Software]]

Revision as of 16:41, 3 October 2018

Box cover.

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 didn't come with any graphic packs, although some versions came with a single graphics pack. This meant that you either had to buy additional packs, or be a really good artist to produce anything useful.
  • The graphic editor could only be controlled by the keyboard, so making any decent art was especially difficult.
  • Although the program supported color printing, the graphics were all stored monochromatic, so it wasn't possible to print a graphic in multiple colors.
  • The configuration for our family printer had the margins off a bit, so it never centered borders correctly.
  • There was no way to import graphics from other formats like BMP or GIF.

Ugly

  • Nothing.

Gallery

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