Programmes which handle vector graphics - a deeper look

Deneba's all-in-one Canvas


A remarkable combination of function and price: it seems to do three times as many things as any other program, for a third or a quarter of the price, so the cost is effectively one-tenth of what the established biggies cost.

Functions

  • image-editing (like Photoshop or Fireworks)
  • painting (like Photoshop or Painter)
  • drawing (like Illustrator, FreeHand or CorelDraw)
  • layout, including web-pages (like Pagemaker, FreeHand or ClarisWorks)
  • presentation (like PowerPoint or ClarisWorks)
  • animation for gifs and QuickTime movies (likeGifBuilder, GIFmation, ImageReady, WebPainter, LiveMotion etc.)

There were many causes of pleasure:

  • it feels like a very generous package, both because you get so many functions for a low price, but even more because you get lots of lovely help freely accessible on Deneba's web-site, and there seems to be a friendly community of users
  • every new object is automatically put on its own layer - like Illustrator, isn't it?

- but ...

1. It means it's a major job to take it all on board and start learning it ... and with so many diferent functions and operating modes and tools, perhaps it's not surprising that the on-line help isn't very well indexed:

e.g. in trying to find out how to create a calligraphic pen, I was directed to the pen manager, but there was no indication of what or where that was ...

... ah! it's a second sub-panel of a sub-panel of the strokes palette ...

2. There were rather too many functions which didn't work as I expected, for me to want to go a lot further with it ...


 

Some aspects which for me were not intuitive

- though I guess they must work properly for people who think in a different way:

  • I never worked out when it was going to auto revert to the pointer from a pen tool
  • when I created a calligraphic pen, with everything deselected as it says and as is normal, and then started to draw/write, it reverted to 'standard' every time ... maybe it's a limitation of the SE version, but it doesn't make you want to shell out money to get the full version
  • I missed the Adobe/Macromedia shortcuts for select, deselect, zoom - these are by now pretty well standard, and I had a hard time even doing something as simple as changing the stroke colour ...
  • sometimes I couldn't choose colours for stroke or for text, neither in post-OS8 sticky mode, nor in OS7 non-sticky mode, nor by tearing off the palette


Some of the functions I missed

- although at the price, it's perfectly reasonable that they're not there:

  • the layers palette isn't particularly friendly
  • Canvas has nothing to correspond to Photoshop's history palette of course ...
  • the templates felt rather primitive
  • the 'mouse-over' indication of the keyboard shortcut for a tool which Photoshop and Illustrator give you


Some oddities

- things which I can't see that they depend on me, so I suspect actually don't work properly:

  • it feels odd and unnecessary that the aspect which is unversally called 'fill' elsewhere is called 'ink' in Canvas - it's not even logical, since the stroke can just as much be done with ink ...
  • 'demystifying curves' says "deselect = esc": but when I clicked on esc three times, it did three levels of undo without deselecting ...
  • in the tool bar the colours usually don't show, just black and white
  • when I tear off the colour palette from the stroke colour in tool bar, what appears is called inks, and if the inks for the fill were already torn off, the new one replaces the old ...
  • "you may smoooth a polygon by selecting the object and the choosing path > smooth" - but when I did that to my triangle the path sub-menus were greyed out ... I had tested that it was indeed selected, by pressing the arrow keys, and it moved
  • Canvas 7 seemed to have problems redrawing the palettes on screen after I had selected something (text?)
  • the list of templates offered when I asked for a new 'animation' document was actually the list offered for the presentation document ...


Of course this is just a personal view - it's such a revolutionary idea, such a generous deal, and such friendly and helpful tutorials, do get the demo and try it for yourself!

Demystifying curves.pdf

www.deneba.com