Elan Computer Group Inc, of Mountain View, California, has released a new electronic publishing system, Avalon Publisher, which uses the X Window system and Sun Microsystems’ Open Look as its user interface. Aimed at the office publishing and technical documentation, Avalon is claimed to include object oriented features and context-sensitive menus to distinguish it from competing products. Words, graphic elements or paragraphs are all considered as objects, and can be cut, copied or pasted through the same set of operations. The menus supply only operations appropriate for the objects selected on screen, so that menus are never more than two layers deep. Other features include ready-made templates, tables charts and forms facilities, spelling checker and thesaurus, and an illustration palate. The company offers a floating licence for the package, enabling users to share the software on a network of workstations and terminals, paying only for concurrent use on the network rather than per CPU. When implemented with Elan’s Licence Manager, the per-user cost is $1,000. It is available on Sun 4s and Sparcstations, with Hewlett-Packard HP 9000 and DECstation versions set for the end of the year.
