Canvas 5 for Windows NT and Windows 95

Incorporating page design, illustration, and image editing into one documentis an inherently complex task that typically involves using several differentprograms to create the final product. Moving vector art, text, and bitmappedimages in and out of several different applications can be time-consuming andvexing because each application has its own interface.

The newly released Canvas 5 for Windows NT and Windows 95 from DenebaSoftware tries to solve this problem by unifying powerful illustration, pagedesign, typography, image-editing, and digital slide-show presentation tools inone package.

Given the number of tools Canvas 5 has to juggle, the integrated interfaceis remarkably fluid. Interface levels are navigable with icons, floating tabbedpalettes, or menus. Some keyboard commands, however, seem arbitrary, such asright-clicking the mouse instead of clicking Enter to complete an action.

You can load sets of tools selectively on startup and save them as toolsets. You can drag objects across document windows, and undo at literally athousand levels. Canvas 5 offers full Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)support, and you can store custom views for magnifying and positioning imageelements. Incremental zoom magnifications range from 3 percent to 2000 percent,a feature I wouldn't mind seeing implemented in all image-editing programs.

Page Design
The program's page design component comes with pre-existing style sheets fornewsletters, brochures, and other columnar multipage documents. Formatted MasterPages that can include multiple columns, headers, text formatting, and kerningare easy to create, and you can assign two formatted Master Pages to a documentto give your project a unified look.

You can view documents in double-page layout mode, as shown in Screen 1,and you can display pages in full color or in wireframe mode, to speed updisplay of complex pages. Pages can have dozens of image and object layers. Youcan name individual pages, lock pages, and assign the locks password protection.

The program has many features related to color accuracy, monitoradjustment, and printing, including the ability to determine colors outside thecyan, magenta, yellow, black (CMYK) color gamut used in most printingapplications. In addition to the standard red, green, blue (RGB) color model,Canvas 5 supports the hue, saturation, and lightness (HSL) system and thePANTONE, Toyo, and TruMatch commercial color reference systems. Canvas can alsogenerate color separations for final publication.

Layout and Illustration
Canvas 5's layout tools offer a high degree of precision dimensioning andalignment (down to 0.5µ on a 38.5' x 38.5' drawing area). You can stroke Béziercurves and lines with numerous effects, including dashes and calligraphic pens.You can easily autotrace high-contrast images into Bézier curves.

You can build objects in multiple layers and hide layers. The controls formanipulating shapes and paths and grouping and ungrouping, are allstraightforward. You can join vector objects as Booleans (add, subtract,intersection) and control transparency, masking, slicing, and shading. Canvas 5can rotate drawings and scale precisely, and the typography controls aresimilarly accurate.

With Canvas 5, you can turn curved vector illustrations into JPEGs andanti-aliased GIFs. The program also has limited 3D vector object extrusion andlathing capabilities, plus some other warping and fractalizing effects, butgiven the high power of most Canvas 5 tools, these other capabilities are not onpar with the rest of the program. Although these tools can be useful for anoccasional special effect, anyone looking for the depth and precision the restof the package provides will have to look elsewhere.

Image Editing
The image editing component offers a powerful array of image adjustment andcorrection tools, including an array of brushes, selection tools, and filters.You can float selections, feather them, and control their opacity. In additionto providing a set of filters nearly identical to Photoshop 3.0's, the programsupports the Photoshop filter extensions for third-party filter support.

Images can contain up to 24 alpha channels. Although the masking controlsare not quite as capable as Photoshop's (you can copy Photoshop's channels fromone document to another, and channel calculations can involve two sourcedocuments and a distinct result document), Canvas's suite of tools will takecare of most page- and image-editing situations. The program supports more than30 vector, image, and text file formats.

Presentation
The presentation component of Canvas generates slide shows you can view on acomputer monitor. You can attach a Master Page to slide presentations, and youcan layer individual pages of the presentation with text and images, the pacingof which the presenter can control. You have a choice of transition effects toapply to each page, and you can embed Audio and QuickTime video into thepresentations.

Bonus Pack
Canvas 5 comes with two CD-ROMs loaded with thousands of images and fonts.However, finding anything on the CD-ROMs is about as easy as reading a barcode.A 5.01 upgrade featuring improved format export and kerning controls is alreadyavailable from Deneba's Web site at www.deneba.com.

Strengths Outweigh Quirks
Each of Canvas 5's components is useful in its own right, but the strengthof this release lies in the way you can combine the program's applications tocreate and edit publications. Despite a few quirks, Canvas 5 has a lot to offer.

Deneba says you can run the program under NT on a 486 with 16MB of RAM. Butfor the best performance, I recommend a Pentium and as much memory as you canafford. The program loaded easily and locked up only once during testing.