OFTEN OVERLOOKED in the battle for the illustration market, Deneba's Canvas has nonetheless attracted fans in scientific fields, who like the program's precision-drawing tools. But Deneba wants more. By revamping the interface to Canvas and adding a slew of such features as improved image-editing tools and sophisticated typographic and page-layout options, Deneba hopes to attract professional illustrators and designers looking for an all-in-one application for their graphics needs.
To start, Canvas 5 sports a sleek interface that packs the power of numerous programs without confusing the user. The Toolbar has been reduced in size and has tear-off palettes for selecting options. Each palette offers a tab metaphor for accessing various options. For instance, the Inks palette contains options for colors, gradients, hatching, symbols, and textures -- each under a separate tab. Each tab can be configured to show the most-used settings.
New image-editing options make Canvas 5 useful for image manipulation. Although it doesn't offer all the bells and whistles of Adobe Photoshop, it does support a fairly complete array of tools for image editing, including masking. It has its own filters for adding special effects, but it also supports Photoshop-compatible filters. Most Canvas tools that work on drawing objects work on paint objects as well, giving users a great deal of flexibility in manipulating pixels.
Deneba also added page-layout features in spades. A new document type transforms the large pasteboard in Canvas 5 into multiple pages, and new icons in the window show the number of pages in the document, allowing easy, PageMaker-like navigation from page to page. There are numerous options for setting type, and you can assign styles on the paragraph and character level.
Of course, Canvas 5 equals Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand in several ways. A new pasteboard offers a canvas as large as 38.5 square feet. New graphic styles let you set fill, stroke, and pen options for use on any vector object, and you can turn any vector object into a custom arrowhead or pattern fill. Deneba has even added transparency options for vector objects, similar to those available with Illustrator's Pathfinder filters.
Priced at $595, Canvas ships with two CD-ROMs of clip art, fonts, and symbols. Upgrades from version 3.5, $149.95. Upgrades for owners of competitive DTP applications, $150. 305-596-5644.