Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!amdahl!oliveb!felix!kehr
From: kehr@felix.UUCP (Shirley Kehr)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Drawing softwares
Keywords: PICT format at least
Message-ID: <75412@felix.UUCP>
Date: 19 Dec 88 15:39:33 GMT
References: <756@dukempd.phy.duke.edu>
Sender: daemon@felix.UUCP
Reply-To: kehr@felix.UUCP (Shirley Kehr)
Organization: FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa, CA
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In article <756@dukempd.phy.duke.edu> fang@dukempd.phy.duke.edu (Fang Zhong) writes:
 
<    I have used MacDraw II. I like two of its many features a lot. It can zoom
<in and out 10 times. It allows me to put a drawing over 25 pages. It has an
<option for decimal pen size.
<    I am open to suggestions. Which other drawing softwares have those features
<and use PICT format?  Where can I get a good deal for the one you would 
<recommend?
<    Thanks in advance.

I tried out MacDraw II last week also. It has two tutorial disks and an
additional tutorial in the manual. These give you a pretty good feel for
the program. I like it a lot, but I already own Canvas. 

I worked with the Canvas 2.0 upgrade only a few hours before I found that
it would not put white text on black boxes, which is a requirement for the
work I do. I called Tech Support and they had me try lots of combinations
using the XOR stuff that I had never paid any attention to.

What I did in the past (Canvas 1) was put bold outline fonts on top of a
black box. This no longer works in either Canvas or MacDraw II. In MacDraw
II, you can use bold text painted white (see color in the manual). This is
something I didn't try with Canvas. (By the way, after consultation with
Canvas support, they told me to ship my disks back to them, which I did
about a week ago.)

Comparing features between Canvas II and MacDraw II, you get the idea that
they each added essentially the same features in many areas.  Each has a
view that you can set, layers, multiple ways to arrange objects on one
layer, better curve handling, autoscrolling, move objects by arrow keys, etc.

Canvas 1 had the ability to move objects a pixel at a time with the arrow
keys, but in version II, you can hold down keys to move 10 or 50 pixels at
a time.

Comparing the features, Canvas II wins by far and it is much cheaper ($169
vs $329 mail order). And of course, Canvas has the paint capibility too.
Claris did a fantastic job on documentation. The manual is wire ring but
hard back. Thanks to their tutorials, I know more about how to use Canvas.
Canvas has improved their documentation (the index is usable now). The 
only thing I wonder is what you get if you buy Canvas II outright.

Original owners got something called an upgrade manual. There is no tutorial
although there are tutorial documents. For those of us who are learning to
draw for the first time, the more help we can get with drawing techniques,
the better. I've used words all my life but am just starting to use art in
documents. My boss wants us to do it all; he does not want to hire an
illustrator and page layout person. Personally I like that, but I wish
there were some courses in drawing on a Macintosh.

Back to your original questions, Canvas has always made it easy to zoom to
other sizes. You can go directly to any level you want. I presume that the
magnification/reduction capability can be set in a View just as you can do
with MacDraw II.

Both programs are great to me, though I am hoping to stay with Canvas if 
they get "my copy" (:-) working properly. When I sent back the disks, I
included samples of text that had been formatted as bold, but it displayed
and printed as outline. Text formatted as outline displayed as outline but
printed as bold. I don't know if I got the program mixed up, but that just
shouldn't have happened under any circumstance.

Shirley Kehr