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Michael Horstman of the Mid-Columbia User Group brings this inside look at Type Twister. Note: the piece was written before Adobe purchased Aldus, however the review is still valid, since Adobe made only cosmetic changes to the program.

Type Twister
Review by Michael Horstman

Aldus Type Twister 1.0 promises to be “The Most Outrageous Type Enhancer” allowing users to apply a variety of shapes and colors to text in any font. The examples on the box suggest a variety of possibilities, such as banners, posters, and invitations. Although I was initially skeptical, Type Twister does, with a few limitations, deliver on its promise.

The easiest way to begin is to launch the program (a slow process on a Performa 638 with 8 Mb RAM) and either paste copied text or type directly into the program’s text box. One may then quickly select from any of the 50 preprogrammed design buttons. Desings may then be modified with the user’s choice of any combination of 30 effects, 48 shapes, and 36 preset color schemes. Since all of these can be applied to any font in the system, the possibilities are nearly endless. Most effects can also be scaled, rotated, and skewed, and the aspect ratio of many can be altered. Effects formed around arcs and circles offer still other effects. If all this weren’t enough, a selection of distinctive styles can be applied to the individual characters themselves.

But this is only the beginning. The designs can be customized or constructed from scratch via color and effect palettes. Once a treatment has been designed and tweaked to the user’s satisfaction, click the ‘Add’ button, and a thumbnail of the new design takes its place among the preset choices.

The output looks great in both color and black and white, though small shaded images necessarily look a little grainy at 300 dpi.

Type Twister certainly does some neat stuff, but it’s not without fault. Text editing tools are minimal; forward delete is not supported, and only one font is allowed in each text box. Traditional word processing character treatments (e.g., bold, underline, strikethough, etc.) aren’t supported or carried over from other applications. The preview area is disappointingly small, especially for more complex layouts or long blocks of text. This wouldn’t be so bad, but there are no guides for size, rotation, or skew angles; one can’t really tell what the actual size of the finished image will be. Of course, the picture can be resized in the target application, but that can cause its own problems.

Text images can’t be printed or saved (except to the clipboard) from within Type Twister, but must be copied and pasted to a destination application. This is a bit disconcerting at first, but it makes good sense, as most people are interested in adding images to other documents. Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) is also available when pasting into OLE-aware applications. It’s best not to scale an image much larger than needed for the final document; larger images take more memory.

Once the desired image has been achieved, the last big decision before copying is to select a resolution that matches your printer. As the manual warns, this is not a decision to be made lightly. There are actually two resolutions of interest, one for QuickDraw printers and an optional PostScript setting. The defaults are 72 and 300 dpi, respectively. Higher resolutions (up to 1200 dpi) translate to geometrically higher memory requirements in all operations: copying, pasting, and final storage. For example, Type Twister needed a 3 Mb RAM allocation (default is 1 Mb) to copy a 6” image at 203 dpi QuickDraw (standard for the Fargo Primera color printer) and 300 dpi PostScript. Moreover, once the 6” image was copied, MS Word (also running with 3 Mb RAM) refused to accept the paste; Claris Works was more accommodating. To check resolution and file sizes, I pasted the image into a Works drawing three times, reducing two of them to 50% and 25%, respectively. The resulting file was 1.6 Mb. The reverse operation (copying the same image at ~1.5” and enlarging 200% and 400%) made the largest image somewhat rougher, but took only ~300K. Dropping the PostScript formatting when copying cut file sizes by about a third in both cases. QuickDraw print quality is equivalent to PostScript, but may take up to 4 times as long (up to 15 min!) to print.

Type Twister has a few other minor quirks. It did strange things to my 15” display, like stroboscopic color changes when switching in and out of the program, changing the desktop colors and stealing the colors from the apple menu icons.

Most of the problems I encountered resulted from using modest equipment to drive the program to limits others may not care to approach. If you have enough RAM or don’t regularly need multiple, large, hi-res images in a single document, Type Twister is a breeze to use and easily enough fun to invite some serious futzing.

Michael Horstman

This article was published in the Mid-Columbia Macintosh User Group newsletter, The Finder. Anyone wishing to reprint it in their nonprofit publication may do so as long as credit is given to the author and McMUG plus one copy of the newsletter containing the review should be sent to: Linda Cameron, 1231 Geneva St., Richland, WA 99352

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