4]----------------------------- 3]REVIEW: PROFESSIONAL DRAW 2.0 3]By Brad Webb 4]----------------------------- Unique is a much abused word, but it applies to Professional Draw from Gold Disk. It is the only structured drawing program available for the Amiga. This review covers its latest incarnation, release 2.0. At its most obvious, a structured drawing program creates drawings that do not increase in graininess as you zoom in. In bitmap drawings or paintings, such as you get from Deluxe Paint, your creation is saved on disk as a series of color dots called pixels. The number of color dots, or resolution, is controlled by the resolution of the paint program. With a structured drawing your work is saved as a mathematical description. This description is rendered as a drawing by the output device you are using, whether its a monitor screen, a printer, a plotter or a film recorder. The resolution of the final output is controlled by the output device. ProDraw will output to all Preferences printers, Postscript equipment and HPGL (Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language) plotters. On a pen plotter, laser printer or professional typesetting equipment, there are absolutely no jaggies --the staired affect you see on bitmapped angled lines and curves. Structured drawings are the lifeblood of professional illustration and desktop publishing due to this lack of jaggies. It is no surprise that Professional Draw is designed to work hand in glove with Gold Disk's top- rated Professional Page desktop publishing program. 3]SCREEN LAYOUT The screen layout is similar to what you see in a desktop publishing program. You begin with a blank page, 8.5 by 11 inches. You can resize the page up 22 by 22 inches. On the right is a toolbox filled with drawing and page manipulation tools. Commands are accessed from a series of pulldown menus. Professional Draw creates drawings on pages which can be organized into folios. The drawing tools are in the center section of the toolbox area. Provided tools for curve, text, ellipse also used for creating circles), rectangle (and squares), grid and freehand tool. Confusingly, the curve tool looks like a pen nib and the freehand tool is a picture of a curve, making each look like it should do the other's job. This mildly annoying choice for tool icons is carried into other areas of the program as well and adds to the learning curve. Immediately above the drawing tools is the page positioning tool. An outer box represents the entire page. You slide a smaller box around inside it to represent the portion of the page shown on the screen. Gold Disk has used this method for controlling scrolling for a long time and it is still the best method I have seen. Above the page positioner are four General Tools. The null pointer is used to manipulate line ends and angle vertices and to move elements of drawings about the screen. The marquee tool is used for selecting several objects at the same time (extended select). The hand move tool is used as an alternative to the page positioning tool. And there is a magnification tool. At the top of the tool box is the page selector gadget. You can click on up and down arrows to move through a folio or enter a number in the box between. This arrangement works well. The six icons at the bottom of the tool box are for editing objects in your drawing. They are tools for sizing, rotation, mirror, distortion (used for twisting and bending), hook (for creating vertices so you can grab a curve or line at any point) and tool for breaking lines and curves. I have felt rather critical of the toolbox symbols. Some are just not descriptive of the tools and are confusing in early use. However, that is all that is wrong with the tools. They are a good collection and work very well. There aren't so many that the cryptic icons and occasional strange operating methods will slow you down drastically, but they will slow your learning. In a program as well designed as Professional Draw, the little things stand out more. 3]PULLDOWNS AND FEATURES Rather than describing every command in the pull down menus I'll describe the range of possibilities they create. Fundamental controls such as saving and loading folio and page files are here. So are page creation, grouping and ungrouping lines into objects, setting line weight, color and pattern and area fills. You can set how lines are to join (mitre, round, bevel and butt). You can determine whether you see your lines in "wireframe" or as thick as they'll print. Objects can be cloned, deleted or loaded from a "clips" file (more on these later). You also access program features from these menus. Some of the more impressive features include automatically running text along curves, using elaborate color dithering, and unlimited blending of colors. ProDraw can make extensive use of color and will let you do color separations for professional color printing. You can blend more than colors in ProDraw, you can blend objects. If you have two simple objects such as a circle and a square, you can use blend to draw a series of objects between them where each object is a stage in the transition from the first to the second original object. There is much to like in ProDraw's bag of tricks. A simple feature I have been wanting for years in paint programs is a method of drawing ovals at something other than 90 degree angles. ProDraw is the first package I have worked with that incorporates this. 3]WORKING WITH PROFESSIONAL DRAW If you have worked with a paint program, you will be surprised by the methods used to construct a drawing with ProDraw. Construct is an accurate description. You don't place areas of color as with a paint program, you define lines and curves. Structured drawings are very mathematical, consisting really of a list of coordinates for lines and angles, curves and radii. You deal with "control points". There is one at each line end, each angle and four on the surface of circles. You can grab these control points and modify your lines and curves. Most curves you will draw are "Bezier curves". You draw such curves indirectly, by clicking on a start point and tangent points. Lines will extend from the tangents an amount equal to the curve severity. You can later modify these tangent control points to change the curve. This all takes some getting used to, and practice is the only way. Once you become comfortable with the method you will find you can draw anything you wish this way. As the lines are being drawn, you can fill areas with color and blend colors. You can chose line widths, including zero, so that effects similar to paint program results can be created. The manual tries to explain how to do this type of drawing, but I found confusing. The best way is to read it quickly and then dive in and try it. 3]CLIPS AND DRAWINGS The drawings created with Professional Draw can be used for any of the purposes you have for a drawing. They are especially well suited to the graphic arts rather than the fine arts. Creating posters, magazine and newspaper illustrations and ads, and newsletter clip art are all perfect uses of ProDraw. To that end, you can build up libraries of "clips" to use with the program. The concept of a "clip" is a bit amorphous but useful. Clips are ProDraw drawings stored in defined libraries for later use. As you create drawing elements you might wish to use often in other drawings, you can store these elements in a clip library. Logos and related pieces of clip art are two examples. You load a library, select a clip and place it on your ProDraw page. You can make an entire page a clip if you wish. Structured drawings look much more professional in any publication than do bitmaps. Professional Draw is designed to work with the Professional Page desktop publishing program and that is the only other program where you can actually see your drawings. There is no Amiga standard for such drawings so that other programs can display them. However, there is a way to use your structured ProDraw drawings in other programs. It supports the Encapsulated Postscript Format. This is a method of storing a drawing in simple text format. Many programs will allow you to import EPSF. I have successfully used EPSF files in PageStream, with no problem. In PageStream and other programs that import EPSF, the drawing will appear as a blank box. Not until the document is printed will it be visible - -and then only if printed on a PostScript printer. However, the results will have all the PostScript quality you expect. In addition, the drawings can be resized in the usual way, at least in PageStream. This is the best way I know of to get "non-jaggy" clip art in PageStream. 3]TRACE AND TRACING One way to create structured clip art or drawings is to trace over a bitmapped image. Professional Draw has the capability of loading a bitmapped image and letting you do such tracing. The lines you create become a structured drawing. The bitmap is shown in lighter colors so you can easily do the tracing. This is a marvelous feature. Load in any piece of bitmapped paint program or digitized clip art and turn it into a non-jaggy structured element for your publication. Again, unless you use Professional Page you will have to import the final work in EPSF format but the capability is well worth having. And what do you do if the bitmap is horribly complex and would take the patience of a saint to trace? Professional Draw even has an answer for that. A separate utility shipped with ProDraw is called Trace. Trace will load any bitmapped image you wish, trace it automatically (you can set some parameters such as how closely it should follow the bitmap's pixels) and give you a structured drawing back Results are amazingly good, though they depend a lot on the nature of the bitmapped image you are working with. Also, there is a tendency to "double draw". For example, a circle in the bitmap may be rendered by Trace as two concentric circles, one for the outer edge and one for the inner. You may need to do some cleanup editing in ProDraw itself. However, this utility alone may be worth the price of the package to some users. 3]THE MANUAL I've hinted that the manual isn't what it should be and that is my clear conclusion. First, it's a paperback book that will not lie flat. No professional level program should be saddled with a manual so poorly bound. It should also have a good, sturdy binder for longevity and ease of storage. Further, this manual has a poor index. This is especially troublesome as information is scattered about. As I was preparing to write this review, I wanted to go over all the toolbox items and pulldown menu commands. I found myself flipping through the manual in increasing irritation. As just one example, the important blend command described above has no index entry. The manual is sketchy in many places. I found myself losing clips until I figured out by trial and error how to hang onto them. The steps to perform some of the drawing tasks are described in a rushed manner, as if the author were unsure and glossed over the procedure. Despite these problems, the manual isn't all bad. It does contain most of the information you will need, if you can find it. It has some good tutorials to get you on your way. Just be sure to read the errata file on disk first and correct the appropriate pages before you start. 3]CONCLUSIONS Professional Draw is an excellent piece of work. Not only does it do what it's supposed to, it does it well. It is relatively easy to use once you become used to the strange icons in the toolbox. The only difficulties are the result of the nature of structured drawings (working with Bezier curves), not the result of the program itself. It is so good that anyone else creating a structured drawing program will find it hard to crack the market. It is also very stable. I never had a lockup, crash or unexpected happening as I did several projects with it. In many ways, ProDraw could act as a model for other Amiga programs. It could perhaps be faster, but it isn't really slow either, considering it is working with a mathematical picture description it must translate on the fly. I am disappointed in the manual but recommend the program itself without qualification. If you want structured drawings for any purpose, if you want "no jaggies" in your clip art, if you want professional level illustration capabilities with color separation and you want it all for a reasonable price, you can have it with Professional Draw. Professional Draw is from Gold Disk, POB 789 Streetsville, Mississauga, ON Canada L5M 2C2. Requirements: One meg of memory, one floppy drive, hard drive recommended. Price: You should find it available for about $180. 4]END OF TEXT