home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Acorn User 1
/
AU_CD1.iso
/
clipart
/
_portfolio
/
_help
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1993-10-02
|
12KB
|
271 lines
Portfolio v1.00
===============
A utility for viewing Clip-Art files
====================================
Introduction
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Portfolio is a utility which can be used to view small versions of clip-art
files, called 'thumbnails'. The advantage of viewing these rather than the
actual clip-art files is that they are usually much smaller, and hence
quicker to load, especially from slow systems such as CD-ROM or networks.
Portfolio allows you to flick through a collection of thumbnails, and search
for particular images on a keyword basis. Once you have found the file you
are interested in, you can drag a file icon from Portfolio's window to
another application such as ArtWorks or Impression.
Important note for RISC OS 2 users:
This application will work under RISC OS 2, but you must be in a 256 colour
mode (e.g. mode 15 or 21), or the thumbnails will not be displayed.
Clip Art directories
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Portfolio expects clip-art to be stored in a certain way. It expects a
clip-art directory to have any of the 3 directories 'ArtWorks', 'TIFF' or
'Sprites'. If you have a clip-art directory such as this, you may drag it to
Portfolio's icon, or its main window, and it will attempt to scan it.
Portfolio is intelligent, in that you can drag either the 'ArtWorks', 'TIFF'
or 'Sprites' directory, or the directory that contains them - it will sort
out what you want.
The ArtWorks Clip Art CD, of course, contains directories that are already
correctly structured, and Portfolio will read these directly with no
problems.
Use
~~~
To load Portfolio, double click on it, and after a short pause its icon will
appear on the icon bar. Clicking on the icon will open the main Portfolio
window. If you are running the application from the ArtWorks Clip-Art CD,
then it will attempt to scan the ArtWorks Clip-Art directory when the window
opens. When the scan is complete, the first thumbnail should be displayed,
along with various information about it. (If for some reason, Portfolio does
not scan a directory when you open the main window, then drag the directory
"ArtWorks" from the CD onto the Portfolio icon, or onto its main window).
Navigation
The six buttons at the top of the window are used to flick through the
thumbnails (which are sorted alphabetically). The buttons have the following
functions, proceeding from left to right:
Move to the first thumbnail in this set.
Move back 10 thumbnails.
Move to the previous thumbnail.
Nove to the next thumbnail.
Move forward 10 thumbnails.
Move to the last thumbnail in this set.
Status field
Underneath these buttons is the status field - this indicates when Portfolio
is scanning, or how many files it has found. Usually it will say something
like "File 1 of 704" which means there are 704 files, and you are looking at
the first one.
File information
The field beneath the thumbnail itself is the name of the file, and below
that is displayed the type of the file, and its size. If the clip-art file
is not found, or it is of an unknown type, this is reported in this field.
Directory information
The field at the very bottom of the window tells you the name of the
clip-art directory you are looking at. This directory will usually contain
the 'ArtWorks', 'TIFF' and 'Sprites' subdirectories. You can only view one
type of file at a time - that is, you cannot, for instance, look at both
TIFF and ArtWorks files at the same time. The field above the directory name
on the right tells you which subdirectory you are looking at - by default it
will choose ArtWorks (if there is an ArtWorks directory). To the right of
this field is a small button. Clicking on this will bring up a menu of the
subdirectories that Portfolio has found that it thinks contain clip-art.
Choosing a directory from this menu will cause Portfolio to scan this
directory for clip-art. If no clip-art is found, then Portfolio reports an
error, and you will have to select another directory to view via the menu (or
you can drag a directory onto Portfolio, as described above).
The File icon
In the lower right of the main window is a file icon - it represents what
type of file you are looking at. This icon behaves like an icon in a RISC OS
Filer window. This means you can drag it to an application you want to load
it (for example, !AWViewer), or double click on it to force an application to
start up and load it if one is not already running. If you double click with
adjust, then the file will be loaded, and the Portfolio window will close,
just like the Filer.
Goto Dialog
Clicking on the button labelled 'Goto...' will bring up a dialog box under
the mouse pointer. This will contain a list of all the clip-art files in the
current directory. When you click on a filename, the dialog will disappear,
and the main window will update to show the file you have chosen. This
enables you to move around the files quickly, or perhaps just browse through
the filenames (as this is quicker than flicking through all the thumbnails).
Searching
Clicking on the 'Search...' button will bring up the search dialog box. You
can type a keyword into this dialog which you would like to search for. The
files on the Clip-Art CD have a simple keyword database associated with them,
and searching for 'car' for example, will find all pictures related to cars.
When you have typed in your keyword, press Return or click on OK, and
Portfolio will search for your keyword in the current list of clip-art files.
When the search has completed, the main window will show the results of the
search - the status field will change to show a message such as:
"File 1 of 22 (selection)"
The 'selection' means that you are not looking at all the files in the
directory, but at a selection. To return to looking at all files, choose the
'View All' button. This button is only available when you have a selection
of files - at other times it serves a different purpose, and is labelled
'Make Index' (see technical section for details). So, when you click on View
All, the selection is cleared, and the viewer shows the first file in the
list, and the button changes to read 'Make Index'. In normal use, you will
probably not need to press 'Make Index', but it is useful if you make your
own clip-art directories.
If you have performed a search which has resulted in a lot of matches, and
you would like to refine it, click on the 'Refine search' icon in the search
dialog box. This will restrict the search to only those files found as a
result of the previous search. So, for example, if you searched for
'animals' and found the number of matches too great, you could then refine
the search for a particular animal.
If you want to perform a partial search, you can put the '*' character at
the end of the search. For example, 'car*' will match 'car', 'card', and
'cartoon', amongst others.
The search system remembers the last 10 keywords you entered - they are
available on the pop-up menu button to the right of the keyword entry field
in the search dialog.
Here are some examples of keywords used in the ClipArt CD database:
object - material 'things' (this is a large group)
design - posters, pages, complicated drawings of things that are
not objects
cartoon - cartoon-style drawings
clip - borders and similar useful things that are not objects;
arrows etc
border - subset of the clip group
sport - sport related pictures
transport - cars, planes, etc.
text - pictures containing special or unusual text effects
landscape - landscape views, sunsets etc.
plant - plants (trees, flowers, etc)
flower - flowers
and also: animal, people, food, computer, music, cat, building...
The groups described above are not strict and many have very fuzzy
boundaries, so experiment to find the best groups for your work.
Technical
~~~~~~~~~
This section is not required reading if you just want to use the Clip Art on
the CD-ROM. It explains how clip-art directories are structured, and how you
might create your own. Please note that Portfolio is NOT public domain, and
is Copyright (C) Computer Concepts Ltd., and should not be redistributed in
any form.
When scanning clip-art directories from a slow medium such as CD-ROM or a
network, Portfolio can take a long time if there are many pictures. To speed
up this process, Portfolio can generate an index file for the directory, and
it will then scan that instead of the file system - this is much faster.
Each clip-art directory on the ClipArt CD has a precompiled index already, so
you will not need to generate them (in fact, attempting to do so will result
in an error, because, obviously, CD-ROM is a read only system).
If you wish to create your own clip-art directories for use with Portfolio,
this is the structure Portfolio expects:
ClipArt
|
+------------------+---------------+
| | |
ArtWorks TIFF Sprites
|
+----------+-------+------+------+------+
| | | | | |
!CCStore A B C1 C2 ...
|
+-------+----+--+-----+----+-----+------+
| | | | | | |
CSV Index A B C1 C2 ...
The 'ClipArt' directory can be called anything - this is just used to hold
the ArtWorks, TIFF and Sprites directories.
For simplicity, only the TIFF structure is shown in full in this diagram;
the ArtWorks and Sprites directories will have similar structures in them.
In the following explanation, you can substitute ArtWorks or Sprites for
'TIFF'.
The TIFF files themselves are held in the A, B, C... directories. All files
beginning with A go in the A directory, and so on. If there are too many
files to fit in the directory, you may use names such as C1, C2, ... as shown
above.
The !CCStore directory contains the resources used by Portfolio for these
TIFF files:
The A, B, C... directories contain the thumbnail sprites which correspond to
the TIFF files. These should have the same name as the TIFF file, e.g.
ClipArt.TIFF.!CCStore.C1.Car is the thumbnail file for ClipArt.TIFF.C1.Car.
How you create these thumbnails is left to you. The snapshot facility of
Paint is a good way of capturing them once you have the image displayed on
screen. Programs such as !ChangeFSI (which comes with RISC OS 3.10), or the
!AWViewer application can be used to display the files at the correct size
for a thumbnail, and then you can grab this with Paint. For best results, the
images should not be more than 150x150 pixels in size (but can rectangular)
in square pixel modes. Larger images will display (up to a limit of 30k on
the thumbnail file size) but redraw problems will occur in the Portfolio
window. The thumbnail sprite file should contain only one image (it doesn't
matter what the sprite is called within the file).
The 'CSV' file is a 'comma separated value' file, which is a list of
filenames and their associated keywords. Examine the CSV files on the CD-ROM
to determine the format of this file - it's very simple. Note that, as with
all CSV files, the first line just contains the names of the fields, and is
ignored by Portfolio.
The 'Index' file is optional, and only exists if you have clicked 'Make
Index' while your directory is loaded into Portfolio. This Index file is not
necessary - it merely speeds up scanning of clip-art directories.
NB. If you make an index, and then add clip-art files, then Portfolio will
not find the extra files as they are not in the index. To get around this,
delete the Index file and force Portfolio to re-scan the directory (e.g. by
dragging the directory to its window). You should then see all the files
correctly, and you can regenerate the index again if you like. For this
reason, it is usually best to leave Index generation until the contents of
the clip-art directory become reasonably stable.
1st October, 1993