Graphics Software Review by Tom Bank

As the cola wars have raged over the years, my favorite soft drinks have been largely left on the sidelines. Why? Because my favorite drinks aren’t colas. The answer to this marketing situation for 7-Up was to market it’s product as the “un-cola,” and if that’s the way to present 7-Up, then Canvas can be called the un-Photoshop!

Do you get more from 7-Up than you do from Coke or Pepsi? I don’t know. But I do know that you get more from Canvas than you do from Photoshop. This program, especially in Version 9, combines almost all the image editing capability of Photoshop, plus a number of features of it’s own, with a very strong bitmapped paint capability, a vector drawing set that goes beyond Illustrator to the commercial CAD (Computer Assisted Drawing) field, the creation of business type presentations, flow charts, and print ready brochures or documents, and the development of both web pages and PDFs. Not only is all this packaged in one program with a standardized interface, the various types of graphic and text objects can be combined in a single document and many of the tools used on one type of graphics can also be applied to the others -- with stunning effect.

And Canvas can automate repetitive tasks using AppleScript or it’s own equivalent called Sequencing. Libraries of macros, set up as a series of steps, can be developed to pre-process folders of input documents, apply a series of filters to a class of pictures to achieve a desired effect, or to create identical, or just similar complex objects, such as gears of a common type but of different sizes and different numbers of teeth.

I admit it, I am a fan of Apple’s all-in-one package ClarisWorks/AppleWorks, and have been since AppleWorks version 1.0 on the Apple IIe. Canvas 9 is to art what the current Macintosh AppleWorks is to basically text documents. It does everything I want to do: it handles bitmapped photos, original bitmapped paint-type art, vector graphics as used in design work, fantastic poster type text, and even animated GIFs to add interest to web pages.

The Interface: What you see: Unlike other graphics programs that open a window the size of the sheet or picture on which you will be working, Canvas opens a window that takes up the whole screen. The page on which you work is centered in this area. On either side are gray areas that can be used as scratch pads for notes, scribbling, testing strokes, and ideas you intend to incorporate into the project. Using the horizontal scroll bar, the worksheet can be moved aside within the window to reveal an entire screen worth of this scratch area. And when you save a document in Canvas format the contents of these areas is saved as well. These areas of the screen are, of course, also used for the toolbox, open palettes, and dialog boxes if you don’t have a second monitor, but the palettes can be conveniently stored in a tabbed dock at the top of the screen to avoid conflict.

Data can be scaled, which is handy if you want to develop scale drawings for model construction. I am into H.O. model railroading, which is a scale of 87 to 1, so I set up a new document, selecting a scale of 1 inch equals 7.25 feet. It did it! I was impressed. In working with small scale drawings it is important to be able to magnify the drawing. At this Canvas excels. The range of magnification available is from 4 percent to 3200 percent which is like saying the program equips you with quite a powerful digital telescope and microscope. If it seems strange to be able to zoom out to a very tiny 4 percent view of your work, consider that the maximum size document Canvas can handles is 2,000 miles by 2,000 miles! There is a reason for this, more on this subject later.

Information Bars: Five bars at the top of the screen and one at the bottom provide access to standard operations, information on and settings for each of the tools in the toolbox as it is being used, dynamic help for the tool that has been selected, and a dock for palettes to keep them handy without having to keep them open. The Tool Properties Bar and the Dynamic Help Bar are really great because the contents they display change to reflect the attributes, variables, and descriptions of the nuances of the specific tool with which you are currently working. You don’t have to open a palette to change the settings of the active tool.

The Palette Dock allows you to keep any palettes you are using on the current project handy in the form of a tab which can be opened with a click and then will close again when you next click outside the palette. On the other hand, if you drag an open palette away from the Dock Bar, it will remain open. Then either drag it back to the bar to close it as a tab, or click on the Close button to put it away completely; or, again, you can set a preference that will return dragged open palettes to the Dock Bar even when you click the Close button.

The Status Bar at the bottom of the screen tells you exactly where your cursor is on the page, which sheet you are on if there are more than one, which layer is active, the color mode in use, the size and location of the active object, what type of object it is, the background and foreground colors it uses, and the width of it’s pen stroke. If that’s not enough, the Status Bar also allows you to navigate through the sheets of your document and to quickly change the viewing zoom ratio of graphic.

If that is more information than you need, each of these bars except the standard Macintosh Menu Bar can be hidden, in which case the palettes can be easily accessed by double clicking the related tool or through the Palettes submenu in the Windows Menu. To me, this demonstrates one of the strong points of Canvas 9. The interface is very intuitive and is also redundant, so different users with different approaches to the interface can easily find the specific items they need without having to memorize the thought patterns of the original programmer to remember where he hid the required item or capability. In the Preferences section of the program (called the Configuration Center) there is even a Personality Manager to aid in tailoring the program to the ways you would find natural to use. Users of Photoshop will frequently have a dozen or more books to help them navigate through the program. With Canvas all that is necessary is in the box, with the added benefit of many insightful tutorials on ACD/Deneba’s web site.

Tools: Canvas has an overwhelming variety of tools (94 major tools) to do your graphic bidding. The good news about this is that they are logically grouped in 12 sets in the toolbox to facilitate ease of access and use (the color dropper and the zoom magnifying glass are individual and always remain directly available). If 94 seems like a lot, selecting and clicking on the EasyShapes tool will open a pop up palette with 67 additional icons for specific shapes from which to select; or if you are doing what we called mechanical drawing when I was a kid, clicking on a dimensioning tool in the toolbox will open a palette of 11 different icons for different types of object dimensioning and you can pick or design the perfect arrowheads for your dimension lines. These sub palettes normally close themselves when you make a selection, but you can easily tear them off of the main tool box and they will stay open, locking together if you wish so that they are easy to move around in groups. And if that isn’t enough, the Canvas tools are in color (Text Tools in purple, dimensioning tools in red and black, etc.), which is an added aid in quickly picking out the tool you are after from an array of open tool palettes.

SpriteLayers and SpriteEffects: SpriteEffects are touted as one of the major features of Canvas, which doesn’t mean a lot to those who are not familiar with the program. To clue you in, SpriteEffects are the means in Canvas by which special effects filters are applied not only to images such as photographs, but to vector, text, paint, and grouped objects as well. A SpriteLayer is applied either directly to an object or to a more or less transparent object which is placed over the basic object being viewed. SpriteEffects filters are then applied to the layer which then affect the view of objects underneath it. As I understand the Sprite process, the object underneath the SpriteLayer is rendered in the SpriteLayer so that photographic effects can be applied, but the vector object remains untouched and can therefore be modified at any time during later development of the project, as long as the project is kept in Canvas format. An object with a SpriteLayer can be made into a lens that will enlarge or reduce the view of the object underneath, or it may blur or modify the view of the image. Also, once set to your liking, a transparent Sprite object can be fixed in view and moved to another location in the project while still containing like a snapshot the view of the object that was originally underneath it. Canvas includes parallels to the basic filters that come with Photoshop, plus any standard third party Photoshop filter can be used in Canvas with a SpriteLayer.

Flow Charting: Flow Charting is a standard business method of diagramming a process, whether it be the flow of material or information on an on-going basis or the steps needed to accomplish the development or construction of a project, usually involving many people. Since Canvas has the ability to quickly draw special shapes such as rectangles, diamond shapes, circles, ovals, and so on, and has the ability to draw vector connecting lines between them plus place text in such figures, the ability to create flow charts is a natural additional feature of the program. This feature uses many of the standard Canvas tools, but has it’s own tools to create special flow chart annotations, such as special connecting lines, rectangles with barred sides, and printed list output symbols.

Page Layout & Typography: Page layout in Canvas works as it should, as anyone accustomed to preparing newsletters, magazine pages, or brochures would expect. Text is entered in text boxes, either from the keyboard or from documents developed outside Canvas. The text boxes can be changed in size, shape, and position as needed and can be chained together to flow the text between columns and pages. Text can be flowed around graphics and other text boxes. Tools are available to copy the format of one text object to other text and to print text either vertically instead of horizontally or wrapped around a vector object or along a preset straight or curved linear path. There is even a tool to do forms for internet web pages that allow the reader to fill in information and tab from one form field to the next.

When using text, an excellent Fonts Menu is a part of the Properties Bar for the text tools and displays as many of the fonts that came with your computer or with Canvas as you have installed. From the Fonts Menu you can open a Fonts Palette which allows you to see the different fonts available as they will appear in your document, including special settings such as underlining, italics, shadow, and so on. Also, you can use any type size you want from 4 to 128 points! For me, that means I can create and print decals for my little trains with extreme detail and graphically match the lettering of the prototype railroads. You can guess how thrilled I was when I discovered that feature!

Output from the page layout feature can take the form of printed material, web pages, or PDFs. Again, “thrilling” was the word that applied when I created my own first PDF! Maybe not for you, but to me the concept of having a Swiss army knife program that turns out PDFs at the press of a button was a real thrill.

Templates: If you use AppleWorks, you are probably familiar with templates. Canvas also provides this tool. Any type of document or project that will be repeated in a set of similar products can be developed with a template containing a standard set of graphics such as logos in preset locations, standard fonts, and standardized typing and layout formats. Templates that are close to what you want can be opened, modified, and resaved for a new project series, but when you create a new document from a template, the template original remains safe and secure.

Input and Output: When it comes to input and output formats, Canvas makes Adobe look like a piker. Canvas can recognize and open or acquire more than fifty file formats and can output more than thirty, a number of them being Adobe’s own file types. When opened, the graphic will appear as a very small object in the upper left-hand corner of the document page. Hold down the shift key and drag the lower right corner of this object to increase it’s size as desired. Text files are best opened in their originating program, then copied to the Mac OS clipboard and pasted into a Canvas document’s text box which keeps the text formatting intact. Interestingly, when I tried this as a test I was surprised to see a number of words with a red line under them. When I enlarged the view I realized that Canvas had automatically invoked it’s spell checker in the background and identified the words it didn’t recognize. Bringing up the spell checker let me quickly tell the program to ignore those entries.

GIS and Scientific Versions of Canvas: OK, I said Canvas did just about everything graphic, all in one program. The truth is there are actually three versions of Canvas 9. The one I have been describing is the standard version, called Canvas Professional. There are also a Scientific Imaging Edition and a GIS Mapping Edition. The scientific imaging version has added features and tools to import and work with DICOM medical imaging files, which are (as I understand it) digital X-rays and micrographic images. The GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping version allows the user to download and work with the map files available from the U.S. government and other sources. This version of the program is aimed at geologists, geographers, the petroleum industry, highway departments, railways, mining interests, forestry, and other fields that depend on their ability to produce and work with very accurate and specialized maps. These two specialized versions are the reason that Canvas can work with extremely large document sizes and provides such a broad range of scales for document viewing.

Beyond the Program: Canvas comes on two disks, a CD-ROM that holds the program and a DVD which contains 310 Western and 27 Asian fonts, and close to 20,000 items of vector clip art. The fonts range from those with only one Font suit in the suitcase to Garamond, which has over 110 different font suits. Fonts are available in both PostScript Type 1 and TrueType forms. All I can say about the clip art library is that it is extremely diverse. It covers the full range of normal clip art and in addition has a wealth of technical, medical, scientific, engineering, safety, electrical, and architectural details and symbols. It is hard for me to imagine anything usable that isn’t represented.

The program is well documented in an 864 page program manual, a 400 page fonts and clip art manual, nearly 100 online tutorials at ACD/Deneba’s website, and online forums for users to ask questions and make suggestions on the use of the program. Beyond the clip art that comes with the program, it is easy to build your own libraries of vector and macro objects.

The Dreaded Learning Curve: Given that there is well over 1,200 pages of documentation in the Canvas package, the learning curve is much better than one would expect. The first 74 pages of the program manual provide succinct tutorials on the various aspects of the program and going through them gives you a good grasp of how to use the tool types available and where they are kept.

In addition, the entire Canvas 9 Manual is built into the Help menu, which opens it in a window belonging to your browser. The Help screen gives you the option of locating the information you are after via the Table of Contents, an alphabetical Index, or a standard Help menu Search feature. I assume that the use of the browser window for the Help function is that the Help menu also links to the ACD/Deneba homepage.

It took me a couple weeks of spare time to go through the tutorials, partly because I am a slow reader and a slow learner, and partly because I am most interested in some special features. When the tutorial gave me a clue as to how to do what I wanted, I would dive ahead into the bulk of the manual and thrash around wildly. My longest side-trip was about a day and a half, and it was a success. Not only did it show me how to do what I needed done, it also taught me a number of lessons about Canvas, where to expect to find other items, and the fine points of vector drawing and digital image processing.

Summary: When I started this review I came up with an outline. Then I was going to work through the features and learn the program, fill in the outline as I went along, and jot down the problems I had or the shortcomings I found to balance the review. The trouble with that approach is that the list of deficiencies I developed early on began to dwindle by the time I was half way through the review process.

As an example, initially I couldn’t find where Canvas had the ability to produce automatic dimension line entries with primary and secondary units, such as both feet and inches (the alternative is to use one unit with fractions or decimal subdivisions, as used in engineering or machining). When I found the Tool Properties Bar had a very small Units menu with “Feet and Inches (' ")” as well as “Feet and Inches,” which would print out as “X Feet and Y Inches” in a dimension line, I was excited. But as I explored this area further I discovered that Canvas went way beyond what I had dreamed. The Tool Properties Bar also has entries which give the exact dimensions of the vector objects you create. As you drag out a rectangle the Properties boxes tell you how long and wide it is. But then it really gets great. If you want your object to be a specific size you can enter those dimensions in the same boxes and watch your object snap to the size specified, in, of course, the scale you have pre-set.

Similarly, in past versions of Canvas I had trouble creating three-dimensional illustrations of objects such as gears and wheels. Boy has there been a big improvement in this area! When I finally got to the tutorial on the extrude effect I found that it has been simplified, for the user -- that is, expanded in it’s ability to add variable amounts of depth to objects, and can be used with other effects to give extruded surfaces both a metallic appearance or a shiny paint job and very realistic shadow effects.

And then there was my frustrated attempt to cut out a portion of a picture and insert the sky from another shot. It took me a while to realize how to use the masking feature, but then I found that there is a single button to press that causes the Magic Wand tool to select a color or a range of colors across the whole bitmapped object or picture and another that turns anti-aliasing on or off for the selection. They work great for clearing the sky behind leafy tree branches.

By the time I got through the tutorials and my random walks through the program manual I had eradicated my list of deficiencies and Canvas had become for me, more than any other, the “OS X killer app” that made the OS upgrade not just worth while but an absolute necessity. In preparing for my own review I had searched for and come across comments on the Internet both pro and con. One malcontent I remember claimed that Canvas hadn’t really improved since Version 6 and used the term “bloatware” for the changes in versions since then. I have Canvas 6 and when it was new I liked it. But that was before I learned what Deneba’s diligent pursuit of graphic artists’ requirements could produce. Every way you look at it, graphics scope, features, user interface, or price: Canvas 9 excels. Nothing else I have used on either the Mac or Windows platform comes close to it.

Canvas 9 is the “Un-Photoshop,” and I’ll add, its the “Un-” for me!

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