By Fred Thorlin
I have just renewed my love/hate relationship with Micrografx’s Picture Publisher. Picture Publisher 4 has been my workhorse for preparing images for print and web publishing for several years. It had the power to do anything that came up for me to do, and it has the power to do a great deal more. It did all of this at a very competitive dollar price. But it takes some getting used to. The down side comes from the barriers it set up in the way to learning how to use its features.
Picture Publisher 8 continues this tradition. The new features are dazzling and addictive. But when you try to use them initially, you discover that the nomenclature appearing in the manual and with the on-line tutorials frequently differs from that appearing on the screen. This condition is exacerbated in this release by the reorganization of the user interface and the provision of a new manual. For example, in the tutorials, menus and tools are referenced by names which don’t appear on the screen and by different names in different tutorials. Probably the most egregious practice is the placement of buttons in the interface which don’t look like buttons!
On the upside there are the new tools which do important things easily if not well. A lot of the focus of this version is on supporting web authors. This includes an easy to work with GIF animator. To create an animation is very easy. Just draw the frames. Find the GIF Animator under the View menu (why not Tools?). Paste in each frame from the original drawing via the clipboard. Click the Play button and you will see your frames cycled into an animation. Strangely, this tool omits loading in an existing animated GIF for editing. You accomplish this by loading the animated GIF as you would a new image; this activates the GIF animator.
My favorite new tool is the JPEG Options panel. This will appear when you elect to Export a file in JPEG format. The original picture is shown on the left and the JPEG compressed image is shown on the right. How much is it compressed? You choose. You adjust the compression with a slider and the compressed image is shown on the right. The before and after image size and estimated load time, at two modem speeds, are displayed. You can also select from three methods of subsampling, but I never saw any impact on the image from them. If you post any photos on the web, you need this tool. There is a similar tool for GIF images. You don’t get to choose your compression with GIFs, you pick your transparent colors (plural!). Each of these menus provide an option for interlaced image formats.
The Wizard Browser is under Tools. Under Effects we have Wizards and then additional features found in the Wizard Browser listed separately. “Consistency is the hob-goblin of small minds.” I get so frustrated with the interface and then I find another jewel. The CoolText wizard produces text with some striking effects. This wizard is one of several places in Picture Publisher 8 where you select a font from a list which displays the font name in itself. This doesn’t work well with all fonts, but it is such an improvement usually, you wish everyone would do it. The wizard works as you would expect ending up with the text in the selected font and size with the selected special effect. The result then compresses very well with the JPEG Export tool.
I had high hopes for the Media Manager component. This provides a way of building a visual collection of thumbnails to facilitate finding them. If you do any modeling, you probably have several hundred texture maps floating around on different CDs and no convenient way of scanning your whole collection to pick out the one you want. I have a similar problem with the collection of images from my wife’s digital camera. Images are grouped into subjects. Subjects are grouped into Collections. The Media provides appropriate tools for associating images into these groupings.
The user interface is absurd.
The top level window, wherein you select the Collection and Subject, can not remain displayed while you are browsing the thumbnails. To bring the top level window back, you have to make a second level menu selection!
Picture Publisher 8 is easily the lowest priced package to provide so much graphics editing capability. The example HAL-PC illustration uses only its most basic capabilities. But what you save in purchase dollars, you will spend in learning its eccentricities.
Fred Thorlin is president of Personal Instruments, Inc. The Houston, Texas based company does Visual Basic development and consulting. You may contact him at fredt@hal-pc.org.
Editor’s Note: We would not be completely honest in our evaluation of this product if we failed to point out the following errors this editor and the reviewer encountered during the review process.
We both encountered several problems in the Tutorial section as well as an inability to save animated GIF files without using the Browse function… to locate the save directory.
Other areas of concern were in “Editing Screen Shots” and “Masking an area of an image” tutorials. To be fair, we are passing our concerns on to Micrografx and will post the results in the next issue.
— Al Massey
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.