RagTime 6 - design - usability - power

RagTime - all new, but tried and tested as ever.
RagTime 6's new functionalty provides you with a more comfortable environment, enabling you to create even more impressive documents.

 

Completely revamped user interface

It's eye candy. We worked with an international designer to revamp RagTime 6's user interface, redesigning icons and adapting traditional symbols to the look & feel of modern operating systems. In the process, we simplified and refined the way people have been working in RagTime for nearly ten years in a number of respects, without, however, changing it entirely. Now it's even more fun to work with RagTime!

Font smoothing with Quartz and GDI+

New technologies used by Windows and Mac OS X have markedly improved the appearance of text on monitors. RagTime 6 supports these technologies (GDI+ under Windows & Quartz under Mac OS X) and uses them not only to display text, but to improve the appearance of lines and other graphical elements as well, thus improving the way your documents appear onscreen in general. RagTime 6 does an especially good job of displaying rotated and small-font text as well as diagonal lines in impeccable quality.
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Transparency for objects, colors, pictures and text

Another advantage of the comprehensive support of modern operating systems now included is that it enables colors, surfaces, pictures and text to be made transparent. Despite the lack of support of transparency in PostScript printing, RagTime is capable of depicting transparent items in RagTime 6 documents as well as via projectors, color printers and your average consumer inkjet printer.
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Outstanding display of transformed objects

Now RagTime displays on-screen objects that have been rotated, cropped or modified in some other manner in exceptional quality. This makes it much easier to place such items and make changes to them.

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RagTime 6 - design - usability - power

RagTime 6 - It doesn't get any easier.
We worked closely together with our users to integrate a host of improvements in RagTime 6, all of which make life and work easier.

Maintaining an overview - The RagTime 6 foyer

You deserve a special reception. The RagTime 6 foyer offers everything you need to get off to an effective start. The RagTime 6 foyer's options go above and beyond RagTime 5's well-known offering, including an overview of recently opened documents as well as a list of frequently used documents, forms and the project folders that are most important to you at any given time. To give you an even better overview, all RagTime documents are shown including a preview—right in the foyer. You can customize the foyer to suit your personal preferences to a great extent.

Keeping the Inventory Tidy

The inventory is the document! In a nutshell, this is how the RagTime inventory works.

It houses all the stylesheets, layouts, tables, pictures and components that make up your RagTime document. RagTime 6's new inventory gives you a much better overview of things especially when working with large documents.

Besides providing the inventory with improved and clearer icons, we gave it the functionality for creating folders, enabling you to group related components such as diagrams along with the spreadsheets and data they relate to.

The sorting order can be reversed. In addition, the entire inventory can be sorted by component type (e.g., starting with texts in sequence, followed by pictures, etc.). New components can be set up directly in the inventory window.

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All key tools in a single palette - the formatting palette

We do eighty percent of our work with twenty percent of our tools . We adhered to this old rule of thumb in compiling the formatting palette.

It contains the most frequently used tools in RagTime 6, including features that were not immediately obvious in version 5 which, however, markedly simplify working with RagTime.

Now formats for text, lines and fills can be set, and stylesheets can be created and used with a single palette.

It also allows for quick and simple adjustments of the document view to suit the user's current needs.




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Easy access to all Unicode characters

There are more characters than meets the eye when looking at the keyboard.

These special glyphs can represent symbols, ligatures and special characters as well as font symbols from other font systems and can now be accessed directly within RagTime 6 via a clearly-structured palette. This allows you to insert authentic international currency symbols, arrows and other graphical elements as well as font characters that are not part of the Roman character set in both body text and legends, as long as they are present on your operating system.
Frequently used glyphs can be grouped in a list and even be accessed via available hotkeys or keyboard shortcuts.

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Searchable font bar

RagTime has always made a distinction between fonts that are installed and those that are used in a document. Under RagTime 6, this list is of even more informational value. Sorted by font families and including font format symbols (PostScript, TrueType and OpenType), the font bar also features a search function. When parts of a font name are entered, the list is updated on the fly, only showing only the fonts that fulfil the search criterion. It's virtually impossible to gain a faster overview.

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RagTime 6 - design - usability - power.

RagTime 6 - there's no substitute for performance.

A host of new, handy features makes RagTime 6 even more powerful and an even better performer.

Finding documents even more quickly using Spotlight and the search filter

Courtesy of the Windows search filter and Spotlight under Mac OS X, modern operating systems provide convenient ways of locating documents both by name and content. On Windows and Mac OS X, version 10.4 and later (Tiger), RagTime 6 also supports the method commonly referred to as full text search. To this end, RagTime provides the operating system with the document's content for indexing, enabling you to relocate RagTime 6 documents even if you only know a few words of their content.
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Click by click - hyperlinks and cross-references in RagTime 6

Now, what has become a matter of course on the Web can also be done in RagTime 6 documents. Create clickable links in RagTime 6 that take you to the Internet or other pages in your document. This simplifies navigation for your document's recipients as they look to jump to marked passages or find supplementary information on the Web. This feature can also be used to launch e-mail applications. Once a document has been converted to PDF from RagTime 6 using Acrobat Distiller or Ghostscript, this functionality is maintained in the PDF document as well.
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Converting RagTime 6 documents into pure HTML

RagTime 6 is capable of converting both simple and complex documents into pure HTML. When creating your document, you don't have to decide whether you want to print it or post it to the Web. The HTML exporter does not replace your Web editor, but does make all of the information and the layout of your RagTime 6 document available on the Internet: text, tables, pictures, and so on. Even text wraps around shapes and complex table structures work like a charm when exporting from RagTime 6 to HTML. You won't find a better solution.
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Converting RagTime 6 documents into pure HTML

RagTime 6 is capable of converting both simple and complex documents into pure HTML. When creating your document, you don't have to decide whether you want to print it or post it to the Web. The HTML exporter does not replace your Web editor, but does make all of the information and the layout of your RagTime 6 document available on the Internet: text, tables, pictures, and so on. Even text wraps around shapes and complex table structures work like a charm when exporting from RagTime 6 to HTML. You won't find a better solution.
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Best available display of EPS files

In addition to vector data, EPS files contain a picture with the preview. While it is generally good enough to serve as a placement aid, its resolution is usually so low that it makes work inconvenient. RagTime 6 creates perfect on-screen views directly from the vector data. You always get the best possible view—even if you place very detailed EPS files on expansive screen real estate or magnify certain parts of your document. To obtain this functionality in Windows, you must have Ghostscript installed.

Best available print quality for EPS files on all printers

If you printed a document including an embedded EPS file on a printer without PostScript in the past, only the preview data were sent to the printer—an unsatisfactory result. RagTime 6 extrapolates the complex print data from EPS files, enabling high-quality print output even to non-PostScript printers, e.g., most inkjet printers. To obtain this functionality in Windows, you must have Ghostscript installed.
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