Labels:text | screenshot | font OCR: Windows Draw? y Tony Curro When I was growing up there was a TV show in which an artist taught you the fundementals of drawing pictures. Later there was Etch-A-Sketch, which is sill popular today. These and many other products on the market all have the same goal, which is to make you an artist. Well in the electronic age we live in, we can become artists without even getting dirty. There are many computer programs on the shelf that will do just that. I was intrigued by a product I saw called Micrografx Windows Draw !. What really caught my eye was the price. I thought, "How much can such a inexpensive program do?" "It cannot compare with the high-end products, can it?" Well to answer in a few short words. You would be suprised and YES! Windows Draw does more than it's price would indicate, and I found it as good as the high-end products if not better. One reason it is so good is because it is so easy to use. Within minutes you can start dabbling' with your masterpeice. Unless you work on the tutorial lessons, and browse through the manual, you will not really get the true worth of the package. But the learning curve is very small. I would venture to say within a half-hour you should have a good grasp of the concepts of the program . I think the installation procedure takes longer than to learn the program. A full installation requires 20MB of hard disk space; minimum installation requires only 5MB of disk space. Full installation took about 20 minutes on my 386-33 system. The program comes with 2600 Clip Arts for you to work with. When you start INSTALL it will show you the avaiable space of the default drive. You can then switch drives until you have one with enough space. Of course you do Microsoft Windows to use this product. You can import and export TIFF, WPG, TXT and many other formats. Once you have a graphic or text on the screen, you can manipulate it in a varitey of ways. For example you may wish to have text wrap around a graphic file. You may wish to have the text appear in an outline, shadow, or mirror it. All these things are very easily done with Windows Draw. There is also a section that shows you how to draw a curve, ellipse, pie and others. I always have troule drawing a stright line in a graphic. By holding the CTRL key as I drag across the screen you will ALWAYS draw a straight line, whether it is horizontal or vertical. I use a logo for my letterhead which show a chair. I have the letters CTM across the back of the chair just like you would see DIRECTOR in the back of the chair of a movie director. You can slant the text or bold or italicize and so on. This took me less than 5 minutes to do. Windows Draw is file and clipboard compatible with Micrografx Designer , Micrografx Charisma, Aldus PageMaker, Ventura Publisher, PC Paintbrush and many other Windows applications. It also works with Adobes' Type Manager and Type Align. Draw comes with extensive context-sensitive on-line help for all facets of the program. If you click on the magnifying glass and press F1, you will get help about that item. Click on the draw tool and press F1 to get help for the tool and so on. The manual contains 17 mini-tutorials and three-task oriented tutorials. Working through these will truly make you a professional of Windows Draw. Clicking on a graphic activates it and shows you 'handles' in the box around the graphic. These handles allow you to control the size of the graphic. Dragging a corner handle proportionally sizes the graphic. Dragging a side or middle handle will re-size the graphic, but it will do so non-proportina l ly . Text and graphics can be combined in Windows Draw. In the aforementioned item I created, both are separate. This means if I clicked on the outside graphic and moved it, the text would stay there and vice versa. By pressing F2 however, it selects all the objects that you can then move as a group. You can even have the text or gaphics in different colors. There is a vast array of palettes to choose from, or you can mix your own. And you don't have to clean your hands afterwards! I was sitting here working one evening around the witching hour, and came across a problem. So I picked up the phone and called Tech. Support. YES! At midnight. They have 24-hour technical support. Weekend and holidays are different. Not everyone works from 9-5. I do, but that is 9PM-5AM, or more likely 2AM, so it is nice to see people working when I do. The technican was helpful and courteous. I have been working with quite a few programs over the last months, and I must say that I was pleased with the manual included with Windows Draw. This manual was pretty well-structured, with explanations about the contents of each chapter, which made zeroing in a specific thing much easier, than having to search the Index or Table of Contents. The Glosssary was another feature I liked. It expalins, in plain English, all the various words and phrases pertaining to Windows Draw and Windows. Some of you may want or need the high-end products like Micrografx Designer or Corel Draw and others in that price range. In these cost consicious times people look for an alternative. While Windows Draw may not do some of the things that Desinger etal. will do, it does more than it price warrants. It more than lives up to it's ad of : Fun, Friendly, and Fast This is a program that should fit nicely in anyone's budget. Product Information == Micrografx Windows Draw? List Price $149.95 Micrografx Inc. T 1303 Arapaho Richardson, TX 75081 800 733-3729
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