Canvas 9 Adds Over 100 New Features for Technical Illustration and Presentation Smart Toolbox Keeps the Right Drawing Tools Ready Eric Grevstad
Mon 7/14/03 -- Can a drawing program be clairvoyant? ACD Systems International says Canvas 9 anticipates what tools and options users are most likely to need next, letting professional technical illustrators, engineers, and designers focus on their print, Web, or presentation output.
ACD's imaging subsidiary (formerly Deneba Systems Inc.) has added over 100 new features to Canvas, including a Smart Toolbox that tracks and displays all drawing tools related to the last tool chosen for efficient workflow; a Properties Bar that keeps track of selected tools and objects and displays the most relevant options at all times; and a new Attributes palette for all pen styles, dash and arrow settings, and colors, gradients, hatches, textures, symbols, and other inks.
New Crop and Scale options adjust resolution and proportion in a single operation, while annotation tools make quick work of drawing callouts and an Image Warp command forms images mathematically into complex shapes. Virtually unlimited ruler and scale settings and double-floating-point, 64-bit-precision vector coordinates meet the requirements of advanced scientific or architectural illustration projects, while expanded file format support includes PDF and EPS. Document page sizes have been expanded up to 2,000 by 2,000 miles.
In addition to the $400 Canvas 9 Professional, specialists can tap $600 Mapping or Scientific Imaging Editions. The former can accurately measure, analyze, and export digital images containing up to 32 bits of floating-point data per channel, with 15 NIH-compliant scientific and binary filters for medical and geological imaging; the latter delivers direct support for geographic coordinate data and manipulation for applications ranging from oil and resource exploration to city planning and census/demographic analysis.
