PrintingPress Platinum

By Dale Farris, Vice-President Golden Triangle PC Club December 2004 The best software for printing invitations and announcements at home, PrintingPress is easy to use, works with any stationery, includes stylish fonts & graphics, and makes it easy to address envelopes and add any photo or graphic to cards for professional-looking results at home. PrintingPress comes in three (3) editions: PrintingPress Standard PrintingPress Platinum PrintingPress Pro PrintingPress Features in all Editions Easily match the size and layout of any card or envelope onscreen for hassle-free printing on any size stationery whether small, scored or with multiple cards per page. The software is pre-configured for standard stationery sizes and includes many samples based on different events to help you get started. Customize with your own text, fonts, colors, graphics and photos imported from your digital camera, scanner or photo CD that automatically scale to the size of your card. Enter names into the Address Book or import them from Outlook to create unique mailing lists for each project. Print individually-addressed envelopes without difficult mail merges. Keep track of your guest list, gifts and thank-you notes, and even print inner envelopes, programs and table place cards. Use the software again and again for all your parties and events, including birthday parties, moving announcements, holiday cards and more. PrintingPress is organized into three main areas: Stationary, Mailing List, and Address Book. The Stationery Wizard provides total control over creating and configuring cards, envelopes and other types of stationery for easy editing and printing. The Stationery Wizard allows you to specify the following: The exact dimensions of the stationery Fold placement (for folded cards) The margins for text and image placement Details for envelopes, overlay pages, programs and table place cards The number of cards per page (for printing perforated sheets of 2 or 4 cards on an 8 1/2 x 11 page) The PrintingPress stationery editor makes it easy to enter or paste text, photos and graphics to create cards exactly the way you want them. The card edit window lets you edit each face of each side of the card. The edit toolbar lets you format text font, size, style and color, as well as paragraph alignment. Envelope addresses can be fully formatted as well. To change the font, size or color for the address or return address on your envelope, just click on the address and it will be outlined with a green box. Then use the edit toolbar to specify the font, size or text color. When the envelope is printed, the temporary address will be replaced with addresses from the Mailing List for this project. If you add photos or other graphics to your card, you can use the powerful image tools of PrintingPress to rotate, resize, flip or fade the image. You can also adjust the image's brightness or transparency, create a faded border effect on the image or convert the image to grayscale. You can always restore the image to its original settings, so it's easy to try many different looks. PrintingPress's powerful image effects make it easy to modify your images to get just the right look. The PrintingPress image toolbar contains many buttons for quick access to PrintingPress's powerful image tools. Insert Image - You can easily add build-in images or your own photos or graphics to your card. Just choose Insert Image in the Image menu and the Insert Image window appears. To use one of the built-in images, choose the category icon to view the list of images in that category. When you select an image, a preview will be displayed in the Image preview box to the right. You can also insert one of your own photos or graphics by clicking on the Browse button and selecting the image file you wish to insert. Flip Horizontal Flips the image horizontally Flip Vertical Flips the image vertically Rotate Left 90 Degrees Rotates the image 90 degrees to the left Rotate Right 90 Degrees Rotates the image 90 degrees to the right Rotate By Degree Lets you specify the degree and rotation direction to precisely rotate your image Resize Image Lets you resize your image using the Resize Image window. The Resize Image window lets you specify the exact dimensions of the image or a percent of the original size. By default, the proportions of the image will remain the same. To freely stretch the image, uncheck Lock aspect ratio. By default, the percent values entered are relative to the original size of the image. To make the percent values be relative to the current size of the image, uncheck Relative to original size. To restore the original image size, click the Reset button. Fade Image Border - Lets you fade the edge of the image into the background of your stationery using the Fade Image Border window. Specify the desired shape of the border fade (no fade, rectangle, oval, diamond, heart or star) with the Border shape combo box. Specify the width of the faded border in the Width field. Specify the fade direction (center, top, left, bottom or right) with the Fade direction combo box. Specify the opacity to which the border should fade in the Opacity field. Set Brightness Lets you adjust the brightness of your image Set Transparency Lets you adjust the transparency/opacity of your image Convert to Grayscale Lets you set your image to be grayscale instead of color. This is a state button, so clicking it again will return the image to its color state. Restore Original Image Restores the image to its original state when it was imported or pasted into PrintingPress. Invitations, announcements and holiday cards need to be mailed to many people at once, and PrintingPress was specifically designed to simplify this daunting task. The Address Book and Mailing Lists are tightly integrated into the software and they offer features that help you print envelopes, track RSVP and thank-you note status, and manage multiple projects easily. The first time you run PrintingPress you will want to set up your Address Book. The Address Book persists across multiple projects so you will only have to do this once, though you may need to periodically update people's addresses when they move. The best way to get your addresses into PrintingPress quickly is with the Import Addresses feature, which lets you import Comma Separated Value (CSV) files that can be exported from most major contact management products like Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, Microsoft Excel and Yahoo! Contacts. When you import your addresses, you will see them added to the Address Book. The oval icons on the left are indicators for you to quickly tell the difference between friends, relatives, and business associates. The Relationship Toolbar lets you quickly set relationships for all your contacts. You can also use the New Address feature to enter addresses quickly and easily right in PrintingPress. The Mailing List specifies the people to whom you will be sending your invitations, announcements or holiday cards created in the current project. For many invitation and announcement projects, you are only half-way there when you put the envelopes in the mail. For weddings, showers and other parties, you have to watch for RSVP cards and tally up who has responded, who is coming, and who you have to call. For moving and birth announcements you have to keep track of all the well-wishers who send you housewarming or baby gifts so you can promptly respond with a thank-you card. And if you have ever planned a wedding or had a baby before, you know you have other things on your mind! The Mailing List shows the current status for each recipient in the current project, as well as the cumulative number of responses received and guests attending. To add names to the Mailing List, select names in the Address Book and select the Add To Mailing List menu item. If you have a large number of names in your Address Book, individually clicking on each one you want to add to your Mailing List may be cumbersome. Alternatively, you can select the Choose Names for Mailing List menu item in the Address Book or Mailing List menus, which will bring up the Select names window. As responses and gifts come in, or thank-you cards go out, you can use the Update Mailing Status window to keep your project's status up to date. You can also keep track of a guest list for the event by adding guests for each name in your Mailing List. You can later use this guest list to print table place cards. To update status information for any name in your Mailing List, click on the name and select Update Status from the Mailing List menu. Mailing Lists are central to PrintingPress. They enable you to print addressed envelopes that look professionally done. Mailing Lists can easily be duplicated to send new cards and envelopes to the same group of people for a different event. You can also print your Mailing List so you can easily review your list of names and addresses. Printing invitation and announcement cards and envelopes has never been easier. Now that you have configured your stationery size and margins with the Stationery Wizard, and designed the contents with the stationery editor, you are ready to use the custom Print window to configure your print job. Different printers behave differently, so the Print window lets you customize settings for the printer you are using as well as choose options for how to print your stationery. The Paper alignment settings allow you to specify how your printer aligns paper in its manual feed tray. The Paper Orientation settings allow you to specify whether you are feeding your stationery through your printer in portrait or landscape mode. The Landscape rotation settings allow you to specify the direction your printer rotates text when it prints in landscape mode. The Print order settings allow you to customize the order in which different sides of your stationery are printed, which can help with large manual-feed print jobs. If you are printing envelopes, use the Print from Mailing List option to choose specific names from your Mailing List. You may initially want to print envelopes for your entire mailing list, but later you can use this option to select a few new names you recently added to the list, or perhaps to print a few thank-you envelopes. When you click the Choose names button, the following window lets you select names from your Mailing List for the current project. You can also select names from your guest list, which you created in your Mailing List, when you are printing table place cards. Nothing is more frustrating than having a time-consuming project take just as long the second time as it did the first, and PrintingPress set out to make sure your future mailings get quicker and easier over time. You can quickly create new projects by importing sample projects. When you import a sample, it creates a new project with all the stationery in the sample and an empty Mailing List. To import a sample project, select New Project from the File menu. The Open Project window will appear. Click on the icon for "Create a new project based on a sample project." Click on a folder to see the list of Baby, Invitation, or Wedding sample projects. Select a project and click the OK button to create your own copy of the sample project. A powerful tool is the Duplicate Project feature, which enables you to make a clean copy of the stationery and Mailing List for a project when you want to repeat the effort and send out a similar mailing. To duplicate a project, select Duplicate Project from the File menu. For example, you have already sent out Holiday Cards 2002 to your friends and family. You have already designed stationery (complete with family photo), and you have already set up a Mailing List. When December 2003 rolls around, you can duplicate your previous project and name it Holiday Cards 2003. Then all you need to do is add new text and a new family photo to the card, and print. The Mailing Status is reset for the new project, so you can track a new set of gifts and thank-you cards for the new holiday season. Another powerful tool is the Export Project feature. This allows you to share projects with other PrintingPress users, send projects to another computer for printing or save a backup of your important projects. For example, if you are creating a wedding invitation, you can export and email the project to your parents for feedback on the wording, the Mailing List and the addressing style. PrintingPress Platinum Features Both PrintingPress Platinum and PrintingPress Pro contain all the features in PrintingPress Standard. Customize stationery with graphical borders, semi-transparent background images and images that float over or under the text. Includes dozens of new original high-resolution border graphics and sample projects. Add images to your envelopes and place cards! Personalize stationery and envelopes with the innovative monogramming tool. Save time by printing both sides of envelopes in a single pass. Align and distribute floating images and text boxes relative to each other or to the card. Use floating text boxes to place horizontal or vertical text anywhere on your stationery. The built-in spelling checker helps prevent errors. Includes loads of enhanced image effects. Add borders to photos and floating text boxes, crop images and more! You can easily add monograms to any stationery using the monogram tool. The simple monogram dialog allows you to choose from one of three predefined monogram styles (Flourish, Classic or Modern). You can show the advanced monogram controls in the dialog for more control over the look of the monogram. The advanced features allow you to use any font on your computer to create your monogram, change the monogram color and change the alignment of the monogram letters. The skew field lets you adjust the skew or rotation of the letters to make italic fonts more upright for a more traditional monogram look. The left and right overlap fields let you adjust the overlap of each letter over the middle letter. The size field lets you adjust the size of the smaller letters relative to the larger middle letter. You can easily add floating images to any stationery, even envelopes and place cards. To add a floating image, choose Image, Insert Image from the Design menu. The Insert Image window will appear. In PrintingPress Platinum, the Insert Image window contains an additional control -- the Float image over text checkbox. If you do not check the checkbox, your image will be inserted into the text of your card. If you check the Float image over text checkbox, the image will be inserted floating over your stationery. The image will have drag handles for stretching and resizing. You can drag the image to any location on the stationery or specify an exact location by choosing Image, Move Image in the Design menu. The Move Image window will appear. Specify the distance from the top edge of the stationery to the top edge of the image in the Distance to top of image field. Specify the distance from the left edge of the stationery to the left edge of the image in the Distance to left of image field. You can also float an image behind the text of your stationery so that the text is printed over the image. Just select the image and then choose Image, Float Behind Text in the Design menu. If your image is floating, either Float Over Text or Float Behind Text will be checked in the Image menu. To insert the image into the text of your card, select the menu item again to uncheck it. Floating text boxes give you complete control over adding text to any card, envelope, place card, or other stationery. Because the text is not a part of the card, it is not constrained to the card's margins or even the orientation of the text. Floating text boxes can be flipped, rotated, stretched, placed over or behind images and even have colorful graphical borders. You can easily add floating text to any stationery using the text box tool. Just choose Text Box, Insert Text Box in the Design menu and the Text Box window will appear. Enter your text in the Text field. You can change the font, size, color and style by clicking on Change font. You can set the horizontal and vertical alignment with the alignment combo boxes. You can specify full justification for both horizontal and vertical alignment. You can condense or expand your text both horizontally and vertically with the condense/expand combo boxes. You can also check for spelling errors in your text by clicking the Check spelling button. If you want the text box to resize to fit the new settings, check the Resize text box to fit text checkbox. If it is not checked, the size of the text box will not change. A preview of the text you have entered will be displayed in the Scaled preview area and will include all the style settings you have specified. Once you click OK, your floating text box will appear on your stationery. You can drag the text box to any location with your mouse, you can use the Move Image window that was described in floating images, and you can align and distribute floating text boxes with other floating objects. The text box is initially floating, but can be inserted into the content of your card by selecting the text box and choosing Text Box, Float Over Text in the Design menu. You can also apply all the enhanced image effects in the image toolbar to your floating text boxes. Just select the text box and click on the desired effect button in the image toolbar. You can use the align and distribute tools to precisely line up and arrange your floating images and text boxes. The tools are available through the Design menu or through the alignment toolbar. To show the alignment toolbar, choose Alignment Toolbar in the View menu. To align or distribute floating objects, first select all the objects you wish to arrange. To select multiple objects, hold down the shift key while clicking on each object. To select all floating objects on your stationery, choose Select All Floating Images in the Edit menu. You can select any combination of images and text boxes. Once the objects are selected, you can use the menu or toolbar to align or distribute them as desired. You can also align or distribute objects relative to your stationery's edges by first selecting Relative to Stationery in the Design menu. PrintingPress Platinum's powerful enhanced image effects make it easy to modify your images to get just the right effect. The PrintingPress Platinum image toolbar contains many additional buttons for quick and easy access to the new tools. Insert Monogram Adds a monogram to your stationery Insert Text Box Adds a floating text box to your stationery Add Stationery Border Adds a border to your stationery Add Background Image Adds a background image to your stationery Crop Image Lets you crop your image. The Crop Image window lets you specify the percent to crop the image from each edge. Move Image Lets you specify an exact location for your image using the Move Image window. Add Image Border Lets you add a border to a photo, graphic, text box, monogram, address or return address with the Insert Border window. Recolor Image Lets you change the hue and brightness of a photo or graphic to recolor the image. Make White Transparent Lets you make all white in a floating text box, monogram or image transparent so that the text or objects below the image will be seen through the white areas. Float Image Over Text Floats an image over the text of your stationery. Float Image Behind Text Floats an image behind the text of your stationery. Hide All Floating Images Hides all floating images, text boxes and monograms. You can add a border to your stationery by choosing Stationery Border, Add Border in the Design menu. The Insert Border window will appear. You can use any of the built-in borders or use the Browse button in the Insert Border window to select a border image file. The border will be sized to fit your stationery. For folded cards, the border is only applied to the selected card face. You can also add borders to images, text boxes and monograms. Just select the object and click on the Add Image Border button in the image toolbar. You can add a background image to your stationery which appears behind any text or images you have on the stationery. To add a background image, select Background Image, Add Background in the Design menu and the Insert Image window will appear. Once you select your image, it is inserted as a background to the card and is automatically set to be semi-transparent so that text will be visible above the image. Also included is a built-in spell checker to help you avoid typographical spelling errors. You can easily check for spelling errors in any card or text box. To check spelling in your card, click in the text of the card and select Check Spelling in the Stationery menu or hit the F7 key. If a spelling error is found, the Check Spelling window will appear. The misspelled word is at the top of the window, and possible suggestions are listed below in the Suggestions field. You can add words to your dictionary so that they will not be considered errors in the future, and you can change other spell-check options in the Spelling Options window. You can print two-sided envelopes in a single pass by unfolding the envelope flap before feeding the envelopes into your printer and selecting the Print front and back in one pass radio button in the Print order box in the Print window. When the Print front and back in one pass option is selected, the address and return address are printed at the same time. The envelope must be fed into the printer bottom-first. PrintingPress Pro Features PrintingPress Pro adds additional main areas to the application. Enter and manage customers and their projects and address books Create employee logins with different access privileges Print reports by customer or by date Track project costs Create mailings to all your customers Recommendations for Target Customers PrintingPress includes a super collection of specialized invitation and related projects and the necessary powerful tools you need to set up and control the layout of your project, font type and size, control over the content and placement of your customized text, color of the text, placement and control of added images, and the addition of borders around your text. In addition, the program provides unique font styles not available anywhere on the Internet. The program has been created to solve the typical problems computer owners face when trying to set up wedding or other types of invitations, including the clever added feature of integrating an address book into the project. This means you can work from within PrintingPress to set up and also print the invitation to everyone in the address book, all from within this single program. In addition, Mountaincow also sells many very nice specially designed stationary, note cards, invitation sets, cards, menus, clear vellum, place cards, and dinner party stationary. These specially designed paper products can be added to your PrintingPress projects, and all are created to be used in most all common household printers, including laser and ink jet printers. The company also makes available tons of additional projects that are readily accessible from the Mountaincow web site, www.mountaincow.com. From their web site, you can download these projects to your computer and then open the added project inside the PrintingPress program. Mountaincow clearly has created something special in the saturated computer software market, a unique product that will definitely be of great value to anyone interested in creating customized party invitations, including dinner parties and weddings. All the many additional projects further broaden the great value of this nifty program to even more computer owners. Prices $  29.99 PrintingPress Standard $  59.99 PrintingPress Platinum $599.00 PrintingPress Pro $  29.99 PrintingPress Wedding - PrintingPress Wedding is a specialized version of PrintingPress that focuses on wedding and shower invitations System Configuration Requirements Pentium 233MHz class processor Windows 98, NT (SP 4) 2000, ME, XP 128MB RAM 100MB free hard disk space CD-ROM drive for CD-ROM version Internet connection (for activation) This product uses technological measures for copy protection. You will not be able to use the product if you do not fully comply with the activation procedures. Activation requires an Internet connection and email. You must accept the license agreement displayed during the installation procedure before you can use this product. If you do not accept the terms of the license agreement, you should return the product for a refund. About Mountaincow Mountaincow is privately owned and operated in Providence, RI by Megan and Josh Eisen. Their software products embody their commitment to design, usability and style. Their flagship product, PrintingPress, makes it easy to design and print professional-looking invitations and announcements using your home computer and printer. Megan has been designing and printing her own invitations and announcements since 1992. Megan's most recent project, our son's birth announcement, proved to be the inspiration for PrintingPress. Tired of using a hodgepodge of word processing, graphic arts, desktop publishing and contact management software, Megan felt it was time to create a single application to manage all aspects of invitation and announcement printing. Contact Josh Eisen, President Mountaincow, LLC P.O. Box 2702 Providence, Rhode Island 02906 800-797-MCOW 401-383-0907 josh@mountaincow.com www.mountaincow.com