Personal Paint for Internet Publishing

As more and more organizations and individuals publish their work on the World Wide Web, it is becoming more important to stand out with carefully thought out Web pages. Graphics play an important part in this. Poorly implemented pages annoy users with images having wrong or missing transparency information, lack of progressive display, and long transmission times for 256-color images where 16 or less colors could achieve the same results.

Cloanto's Personal Paint is an excellent tool for Internet publishing: professional color reduction, quantization, dithering and antialiasing algorithms yield excellent quality at resolutions, numbers of colors and file sizes which yield optimal results on the Web.

Transparency and progressive display are fully supported by Personal Paint, and so are new Web formats such as PNG. Cloanto and the Amiga have years of experience where PC and Mac companies are just beginning to introduce products.

Personal Paint 6.4 is included with the Amiga in the Internet Surfer pack. The GIF module for Personal Paint is available from public domain sources. Current Internet-related projects at Cloanto include new versions of Personal Paint and a Cloanto Web site. More details on these will be announced soon.


Public Domain GIF Module for Personal Paint

Cloanto has just released a new GIF I/O module ("personal_gif_io.library" version 5.0) for Personal Paint, with includes support and documentation for Internet features such as transparency and progressive display. The archive has been placed in the public domain, and is available through sources such as CompuServe and the Aminet. This material should be especially useful for Internet developers (as it puts Personal Paint in control of specific options of GIF89a), and users of the Amiga bundle packs (in which Personal Paint is supplied without the GIF module).

On CompuServe: GO AMIGAUSER, Library 8, GIF_IO.LHA
On the Aminet: gfx/conv/gif_io.lha


DataTypes for the Amiga Surfer Pack

Cloanto has completed development of a set of high-quality Amiga DataTypes for the GIF, JPEG, PNG and XBM formats, which are fast, system compliant, and support unusual format variants. These DataTypes incorporate years of experience acquired with Personal Paint. They support 24-bit DataType tag extensions, and can pass true color data to applications such as the CyberGraphX software. The DataTypes allow the Amiga Surfer pack to process more than 99.5% of the pictures on the Web. This is a higher average than comparable Mac and PC systems.

The new DataTypes are included with the Amiga in the Surfer pack.


Cloanto and CD-ROMs

With the Personal Suite CD-ROM, Cloanto was the first company launching an Amiga CD-ROM product containing quality commercial (not freely available) software at a popular price. Initially, this was felt as a particularly risky task, given that in the Amiga community CD-ROMs are often perceived as low-quality collections of existing, free distribution software. While the Personal Suite in its metal box full of commercial software is now becoming a collector's item, Cloanto is proud to release The Kara Collection CD-ROM.

With the help of the Amiga community, new CD-ROM titles are being developed. Products to be announced soon include Photo CD software.


New from Cloanto: The Kara Collection CD-ROM

This CD-ROM includes for the first time the complete collection of ColorFonts, AnimFonts, Starfields and Plaquegrounds, plus a full set of support tools by Kara Computer Graphics and Cloanto.

This is not a compilation of public domain material. Kara fonts are used by the finest professionals on different computing platforms. They are great for pictures, animations, titling effects and presentations. The CD-ROM contains 80 Amiga ColorFonts (with effects like Brick, Glass, Chrome, Chisel, etc.), plus hundreds of alternate color palettes. All ColorFonts are also supplied in different formats used by video titling packages. The CD-ROM includes the new Cloanto ColorType software, which allows the user to apply changes to the ColorFonts (also automatically via ARexx). The Cloanto Personal Fonts Maker package and additional printer-downloadable fonts in black & white are also included.

AnimFonts use animated brushes to render effects like handwriting, rotating characters, fuse-like sparkles, etc. The fonts can be used to create animations with any Amiga package supporting Anim-Brushes. The CD-ROM contains a software upgrade with Anim-Brush extensions for users of Personal Paint, plus ARexx scripts to automate the rendering process. As Kara says, "So long to the laborious task of placing individual letters... This is the way AnimFonts were meant to be!!!"

The set of Starfields animations includes moving stars seen from different perspectives, plus animated space objects. The collection of Plaquegrounds contains textures and backgrounds (e.g. granite, marble, sand-stone, wood, etc.) stored in different syles and sizes (as 24-bit images and in other popular formats). Starfields and Plaquegrounds can be used alone, or as a background for the ColorFonts and AnimFonts.

Cloanto has a tradition of quality packages at an affordable price. This CD-ROM contains ten years of artwork by Kara Computer Graphics, at a fraction of the price of the original, separate packages. Most of the material in The Kara Collection is being brought to the public for the first time, exclusively on this CD-ROM.


For more information send E-mail to info@cloanto.it
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