Impression II and Junior Impression II, an improved version of the product, was released in 1990 alongside
Impression Junior, a cut-down version of Impression II priced at £103, compared to the £194 price of the "senior" product. Given a degree of instability in early versions of Impression, Computer Concepts had promised a free upgrade to Impression version 1.1 to existing users. Ultimately, the further development of the software led to a more significant release incorporating several enhancements, and this Impression II release was offered as a free upgrade instead. Enhancements included improved frame selection and manipulation controls, repeating frames for headers and footers, and "instant" in-place rotation of
vector and
bitmap graphics. Impression II was featured in the
Acorn Publishing System: a bundle featuring an
Archimedes 540 computer, Impression II software,
SVGA-capable monitor, 120 MB hard drive, 256-
greyscale flatbed scanner (Computer Concepts' ScanLight Professional), and direct-drive
Canon laser printer (Computer Concepts' LaserDirect HiRes8) for a suggested retail price of £4995 plus VAT. Impression Junior was introduced to compete with
word processors on the RISC OS platform such as Pipedream and First Word Plus, both considered "fundamentally character mode programs" with some graphical support. Certain layout features were preserved from the "senior" product such as the use of frames, but "master pages" (a form of templates) and the style mechanism were omitted (or "simplified"), emphasising traditional effect-based styling of text instead. As with Impression, documents could be printed in a form accurately portraying their on-screen appearance, making use of
outline fonts and the font manager, but for rapid output the draft and
near-letter quality modes of printers could be used instead. One noted omission was a convenient
mailmerge function, although conventional word processing features such as automatic contents and index generation were also omitted from the product. Mailmerge functionality was featured in the
Impression Business Supplement product, introduced in 1991 for Impression 2.10 at a price of £57.57, which also provided support for four-colour separations, the
ExpressionPS tool for the processing of
PostScript for
typesetting purposes, and a selection of file format loaders. However, these mailmerge capabilities were regarded as somewhat inferior to that provided by the variant of Impression Junior featured in Acorn's
Advance integrated office suite. In 1997, Impression Junior was made available as a free download from Computer Concepts' Web site, having been replaced in the company's product range by Impression Style in December 1993. The download was perceived as a way of evaluating the Impression family of products for potential purchasers of Impression Style and Publisher.
Impression Publisher and Style In 1993, Computer Concepts revamped the Impression product line, creating
Impression Publisher as the successor to Impression II and
Impression Style as the successor to Impression Junior. Impression Publisher added various features aimed more at professional use to the core product, such as
CMYK colour separations and crop marks, alongside other enhancements. Impression Style built on feedback from existing users and on work done on Impression Junior to produce the word processor component of Acorn Advance. Both Impression Publisher and Style supported "
object linking and embedding" (OLE) and
24-bit colour, and were offered as upgrades to existing users of Impression II and Junior respectively at the same price of £29 plus VAT. Impression Publisher was also bundled with the separate
Equasor and
TableMate tools to take advantage of the OLE support, as was Impression Style, with the inclusion of Equasor being regarded as welcome but not as comprehensive as the mathematical
typography support of Icon Technology's TechWriter (its principal competitor in this regard), and with TableMate seeking to augment the elementary table editing functionality in the Impression series, being regarded as a "delightful little utility" that was somewhat less flexible than the table support of other word processors (such as Colton Software's Wordz) but "hugely preferable" to the established, "cumbersome" construction of tables using horizontal and vertical rules. A significant enhancement to Impression Publisher not present in Impression Style was support for irregular frames, albeit only for frames containing graphics, not text. This kind of frame was able to repel text in text frames, thus removing the need for various workarounds that would otherwise be employed to cause text to be wrapped around other areas of a page. Such frames could have non-rectangular outlines involving additional points or nodes, and they could be rotated and scaled, but the irregular frame edge could only consist of straight line sections, not curves, and controls were not provided for precise positioning of outline points. Support for irregular text frames was stated as planned for subsequent versions. Computer Concepts and the other vendors involved in providing the component applications of Acorn Advance - Clares and Iota - offered a
Musketeer pack featuring Impression Style and the other "full-featured" versions of the Advance applications - Schema 2 and Datapower - as a form of upgrade for Advance users costing £249 plus VAT instead of the combined £385 plus VAT cost of the separate packages. (Curiously, Schema was originally developed by Acorn but transferred to Clares Micro Supplies as a consequence of a decision by Acorn to stop developing applications software itself.) An enhanced
Impression Publisher Plus product became available in 1994, adding support for various professional publishing features such as Open Pre-Press Interface (OPI) for the substitution of high resolution images when typesetting,
Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) and
Desktop Colour Separation (DCS), along with other enhancements such as a new colour selection tool supporting spot, process and tint colour handling. The price of Publisher Plus was £299 plus VAT, with an upgrade from Publisher costing £130 plus VAT, with the additional features producing a product with "
Quark-like facilities at a substantially lower price". The other enhancements were regarded as "nice extra touches", although a "proper" undo option was still absent, and other noted frustrations with Publisher's user interface remained. A
32-bit conversion and improvement project initiated in 2003 was named
Impression-X. == Impact ==