Timeworks Publisher

Timeworks Publisher was a desktop publishing (DTP) program produced by GST Software in the United Kingdom.

It is notable as the first affordable DTP program. In appearance and operation, it was a Ventura Publisher clone, but it was possible to run it on a computer without a hard disk.

The TOS version of Timeworks relied on the GDOS software components, which were available from Atari but were often distributed with applications that required them. GDOS provided TOS/GEM with a standardized method for installing printer drivers and additional fonts, although these were limited to bitmapped fonts in all but the later releases. GDOS had a reputation for being difficult to configure, used a lot of system resources and was fairly buggy, meaning that Timeworks could struggle to run on systems without a hard disk and less than 2MiB of memory - but it was possible, and for many users Timeworks was an inexpensive introduction to desktop publishing.

For the IBM PC, Timeworks Publisher ran on Digital Research, Inc.'s Graphics Environment Manager (GEM) Desktop (supplied with the program). Later versions ran on Microsoft Windows.

Version 2 of Timeworks Publisher included full WYSIWYG, paragraph tagging, manual control of kerning, text and graphics imports and more fonts.

In the US, Timeworks Inc. marketed the program as Publish-It!. Released in 1988, there were versions available for IBM PC (running over the GEM Environment), Apple Macintosh, and Apple II (Enhanced IIe or better) computers.

DESKpress was a version aimed at the business market, and Press International was a later CD-based multilingual version for Windows.