Re: [Swarm Modelling] painting apps

[Darren Schreiber]

I use Canvas 8.0 (http://www.deneba.com/products/canvas8/default2.html) 
which is $399 and OS X native (they have a good educational discount.)  
This is probably overkill for just curves, but this is my favorite 
graphics tool and I have been using it for over 10 years.  It is object 
oriented in design and could be used to replace Adobe Illustrator and 
Photoshop, Freehand, etc because text, bit maps, vector images, etc are 
all neatly integrated.

Two nights ago, I moved in a .jpg from Mapquest of my neighborhood, set 
its transparency to 50%, used Bezier curves to trace over the important 
streets in my neighborhood, used the clip-on text feature to attach 
street names that followed the curve of the street, and had a custom 
professional looking map of my neighborhood for my girlfriend.  The 
text is spell checked, but I can still extrude it into three 
dimensions, texture it, and set a color gradient through it.  It can do 
a lot of the work of Photoshop, including accepting plugins.  And, you 
can do drawing (like precision vector work), painting (resulting in 
bitmaps from a variety of brushes, etc), and photo work in one package. 
Absolutely amazing tool that I use constantly.  Also, the customer 
support is solid.

I noticed on their website that the old version (Canvas 7) is available 
for $85 as a download 
(http://www.deneba.com/products/canvas7se/default.html) (why don't more 
software companies do that with old versions??)  I used version 6 for a 
very long time and used it in Classic mode until I got grant money for 
a new version.  If you don't mind working in Classic mode and price is 
an issue then Canvas 7 would be a great solution.

Both versions of Canvas will output into about any format you can think 
of.

If you already have Microsoft Word, it has some drawing tools included. 
 They are kind of idiosyncratic though and if you are using LaTex, you 
probably aren't a Microsoft fan.

Again, I would highly recommend Canvas, it can do the work of a lot of 
other tools in an nice integrated package.  And, at 85$ for the old 
version the price point would not be beatable.

        Darren


On Saturday, February 15, 2003, at 02:36  PM, Scott Christley wrote:

> I know this isn't a modeling question but hopefully those of you 
> writing papers which include graphics have found a solution.
>
> I'm looking for a basic painting application with tools for drawing 
> graph type structures; circles, boxes, curvy lines(bezier curves), 
> arcs, arrows, labels, that sort of stuff, but not with freehand which 
> will just look sloppy.  The app should also be able to export the 
> images into a format that can be processed by LaTex, encapsulated 
> postscript (EPS) being optimal.  Lastly, I want it to run on Mac OSX 
> but I'm also open to any free software for GNU/Linux.
>
> I know I can probably buy one of those expensive Adobe packages but 
> that seems overkill for the type of stuff I want to paint.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> thanks
> Scott
>
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