Contact: Dan Kilroy
Email: dan@pagestream.org

March 8, 2006 ­ Grasshopper today announces the first releases of PageStream for LinuxPPC. PageStream is a desktop publishing program available for Linux, Windows, Macintosh, and Amiga variants with a rich assortment of features and a solid 20 year history.

Like other publishing programs, PageStream can be used to set type, draw objects, and place graphics. It has extremely precise typography and professional printing. PageStream differs from other DTP programs in that it has most of the drawing features of an illustration program, unique features, a lower price, and most importantly, an outstanding interface.

Highlighted features include advanced path editing, object transparency, stable document format that allows PageStream documents to be exchanged across platforms and versions, groups and layers, chapters and subchapters with master pages and styles, fully customizable text styles, hanging punctuation, paragraph and character style tags, actions are fully recordable and playable internally and scriptable with Python, full undo/redo, built-in support for 22 languages (and growing), and arbitrary text frame shapes. PageStream support for widely-used authoring and graphic file formats includes EPS, Illustrator, JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, IFF, RTF, HTML, Word, and PDF.

The professional version of 5.0 includes loading of PDF files as editable documents, text-on-path and text-in-path distortions, numerous bitmap filters, borders, advanced blending and typographic functions, and complex path operations.

Currently the PageStream developers are working on the next update to 5.0 which merges Macintosh OSX and Amiga branches to the main branch. Features in these branches include new font management; halftone and various dithering for bitmap rendering of selected objects in addition to existing RGB, CMYK, and Grayscale output; new scripting commands; additional language support; and further application refinements.

For many more details, see the PageStream home page:

     http://www.pagestream.org

PageStream documentation:

     http://www.pagestream.org/showdocs.php

PageStream LinuxPPC developed on ODW Pegasos II hardware as provided by Genesi:

     http://www.pegasosppc.com/

About PageStream

PageStream was one of the first desktop publishing programs released in 1986. Then named Publishing Partner and released for the Atari ST computers, Personal Publishing magazine called it a "knockout program". Later it was renamed PageStream and released for the Commodore Amiga computers in 1989. PageStream is now available for the Amiga, Linux, Macintosh, and Windows operating systems and is one of the oldest names in the industry. PageStream 5.0 MSRP is $99 USD, and PageStream5.0 Pro MSRP is $149 USD. Upgrades start as low as $20 USD.

If you would like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with the developers, please e-mail Dan at dan@pagestream.org.