The clamour to climb aboard the desktop publishing bandwaggon, even before the customers have given it a real push, continues unabated. Latest to shove itself forward in the UK is Dest Corp of Milpitas, California which, through its UK distributor Lexisystems Ltd of Frome, Somerset, is now offering enhanced image scanning products for IBM-compatible personal computers and Apple Macintoshes. PC Scan Plus is a graphics enhanced version of PC Scan, the scanner for IBM-compatibles that Dest brought to the UK in September. It features an 80186 processor with 750Kb RAM and proprietary VLSI character recognition and scaler chips. It offers halftone scanning in 32 shades of grey at 200, 240 and 300 dots per inch at speeds of up to one A4 page in nine seconds, and, combined with the new Publish Pac software, enables photographs and other images to be loaded into desktop publishing applications in standard ASCII files. Image editing is provided in the MS-DOS version of Publish Pac by Z Soft Corp’s PC Paintbrush Plus and for the Mac version by Software Beach Inc’s Super-Paint Image Editor. To make sure that Publish Pac images are compatible with all leading desktop publishing software, Dest is feverishly signing co-operative agreements with vendors. Over 40 have been signed up so far, and Dest has also established the tagged image file format – TIFF – with Aldus Corp and Microsoft Corp. PC Scan Plus costs UKP2,885 and Publish Pac comes in at UKP795.
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