There are many ways to create images on the Macintosh. You can type up a ReadMe file or design a page with your favorite Paint program; Use sounds from the vast public domain library or record your own. Museum allows you to combine these diverse resources into a self-contained application, one that actually opens when you double-click on it!
To reach the widest audience you may want to give special consideration to your Museum document -- How will it look in Black & White? On a smaller screen? How much disk storage space will be required? This section will point out some guidelines, discuss trade-offs, and describe Museum's page resources.
"A picture is worth a thousand words..." (True or False?)
• TEXT is probably the most compact medium. It's fun to scroll through text, but not that fun.
• CAPTURE programs allow you to select a portion of what you see on-screen. They're very handy. Full-color snap-shots can get quite large though. (Hint: Set your monitors to the minimum screen-depth at which your picture still looks good, to save memory.)
• Images created with a DRAW program are often more compact than 'captured' images. However, if you use non-standard fonts, the appearance of text in your drawing may change on a Mac without your special font installed. (A Font will be substituted.) You may want to 'capture' a drawing that contains 'special-font' text. (Museum upgrades will provide an import-font feature as well as Text Styles.)
• PAINT programs come in two varieties... Some treat the image as a collection of objects, some combine them all into one large 'BitMap'. The complexity of the drawing itself determines which is more memory-efficient, experiment.
• COLOR Screen Depths... Whatever method you use for pictures, consider how many colors you need, and how many colors your program is actually saving. Many programs save the full screen depth even though you only used a few colors.
• In general, use COLOR sparingly if you're concerned about storage space. If not, go hog-wild! To accommodate huge pictures (over 200K) you may need to increase Museum's memory size. (You can set an application's memory size by selecting the application from the desktop, then choosing 'Get Info' under the 'File' Menu.) To run, Museum requires roughly twice the size of the largest resource you put in it. Many users will not appreciate either huge disk files or inordinate memory requirements.
• COLOR USERS: BE SURE TO CHECK THE APPEARANCE OF COLOR IMAGES UNDER VARIOUS COLOR SETTINGS, including Black & White! You can do this by choosing
'Monitors' from the Control Panel. Designing a page that looks good in both color and Black & White is quite a challenge.
• A FINAL word about COLOR -- It may be a good idea to select the 'Gray-Lt' palette from the 'Colors' menu before distributing your final document. The Gray-Lt color uses the fewest shades and looks good on monitors all the way down to 4 grays. Other palettes will still look presentable but may 'steal' color from your pictures (for 'Museum Style' highlite shades) on monitors with 16 colors or less.
• Page Resources
Museum recognizes these 3 resources formats...
-- 'PICT'
-- 'TEXT'
-- ' snd'
The way you get resources into Museum is to 'Paste' them from the Clipboard. When in doubt, follow that simple rule.
Most programs will paste their goodies into the clipboard in these formats. (These are the standard Macintosh formats as of '92) It may be convenient to first transfer all your resources to the Scrapbook, then into Museum from the Scrapbook.
• SOUNDS
Pasting sound into Museum is straight-forward in concept. Paste the sound from the clipboard, just as you would a picture or text. (Yes, the Clipboard and Scrapbook both accept ' snd' resources.) Unfortunately, getting sounds into the clipboard may not be so easy. If you've managed to get a sound into your Control panel, you can select it, and choose 'Copy' to put it into the clipboard. There are a number of Shareware programs to further help you convert the numerous sound formats into a ' snd' resource.
Museum can paste one sound per page. (Sound can only be pasted onto an existing page, so create a dummy page if necessary) Museum's Sound Cut & Paste commands (in the Edit menu) manipulate the sound on a page without disturbing the Picture or Text. If you want to manipulate the entire page (including sound) then use the standard Edit commands to move the entire page around.
