Bridge 5
This Bridge chapter applies to the full version of Bridge 5, which may be purchased separately for Calamus. If you own this full version, the following parts of your Calamus documentation can be replaced by this Bridge 5 manual:
SL99 Supplementary manual: Pages 51 to 96
SL2000 Complete manual: Pages MF 3-1 to MF#3-36.
How it all started
When the original version of Bridge was developed in 1993, it was solely meant to allow Calamus SL to export all the formats it could import. While these export drivers were being written, the idea arose that these individual drivers should be collected up in a module which would then be in the position to export more than just the contents of a single frame. With the possibilities offered by Calamus SL as a graphical operating system, this led almost inevitably to the export of even whole pages.
But it was also the case that the Dataformer (as Bridge was called originally) could not quite deny its roots. At its heart it was just a jumble of export drivers which had been tuned a bit. Luckily the many features contained in the module did not remain hidden, and its users sent in many suggestions for enhancement. Particular stumbling-blocks were the user interface and the possibility to export to files only. Very soon the developers realized that the Dataformer was being used with PostScript® printers and HPGL compatible plotters, but was optimized rather for raster image formats. Furthermore for a long time there had been the desire to change data in the document without having to export it.
Thus Bridge 2 was born and succeeded in practice, though the PostScript output part quickly demonstrated aggravating weaknesses. Double pages, master page elements, masks and many other features could not be exported well or at all. Some functions had been poorly implemented and needed urgent revision. Due to the fact that many other modules came up and offered new solutions for jobs that had previously been done by Bridge, Bridge 2 fell more and more behind and there was hardly any further development by DMC.
When MGI, the new owner of Calamus, gave the development rights for Calamus®SL to invers Software Vertrieb, it was clear that Bridge was the first candidate for a complete overhaul. Fortunately some serious problems within the Calamus program itself could be solved parallel to the nine month new development of Bridge, and offered many new features for improved PostScript output.
With Bridge 5 you now have the central output module for object oriented PostScript, EPS, PDF and plot files in your hands, which can do many other important jobs as well. You can alter any kind of raster image frame in appreciably more complex and different ways than in the Frame module. You may change all text frames of a complete document to vector frames at a single mouse click (perfect for export and document transport without fonts). Other features of the Bridge 5 module are colour separation control functions and pre-rasterization of image frames. We hope you will be able to work with this module without problems after you read this part of the manual and really use this "bridge" to PostScript and other worlds of foreign data formats.
Like many other complex Calamus modules, Bridge 5 uses the so-called "Function panel" and offers 6 different function groups in this panel:
Dataformer function group
EPS & PostScript export function group
PDF export function group
Convert to bitmap graphic function group
Convert to vector graphic function group
Bridge settings function group
