What's New in Photo-Paint 9

		by David Mutch Ph.D. Corel Down Under User Group, Melbourne, Australia

TEXT HANDLING

Text handling in PP9 is vastly improved.

Individual text characters/elements within a single text object can now be altered in place, on screen during creation and editing.

One can now change the font, colour, style and position of individual characters (Figure 7).

However, Character and Line spacing settings still control the whole text object as a single entity, although kerning can be set for each character.

Figure 7. Single Object Text Modification in PP9.
This text was modified in place in PP9 from a single text object. The font, font size, colour, position, and style can all by altered for individual characters if desired.

Figure 8a. Text modified using the new Bubbles Texture effect.
(Effects > Texture > Bubbles )

To alter a subset of characters they need to be selected while in text edit mode. This was a bit tricky at first and I often jumped out of text edit mode when attempting to select text at the far right or far left of the object. This became much easier with practice.

One thing that did take me some time to come to grips with though was to realise that I needed to set the correct initial (base ?) font and character size right from the start to avoid having to try to re-select all the text within an object to change it. With PP8, even after the text had been created, a change to the font or the character size automatically changed the selected text. In PP9, if you have already created your text and the cursor is after the final character, then changing the font or the character size will do absolutely nothing - some characters must be selected first. Thus I soon got into the habit of selecting my base characteristics first before typing any text.

Figure 8b. Text modified using the new Elephant Skin Texture effect.
(Effects > Texture > Elephant Skin )

Figure 8c. Text modified using the new Elephant Skin Texture effect.
(Effects > Texture > Elephant Skin )

The improvements to the text tool in PP9 are really outstanding when compared to competing products such as PhotoShop 5, Fireworks 2, Painter, Photo Impact or Paint Shop Pro. It really puts all the others to shame!

Superb results can be obtained quickly and easily when text is combined with the many new effects in PP9 (refer to the Effects section of this review).

Figure 8e. Text modified using the new Plastic Texture effect.
(Effects > Texture > Plastic )

Figure 8d. Text modified using the new Elephant Skin Texture effect.
(Effects > Texture > Elephant Skin )

Figures 8a to 8e show some examples of combining PP9 text with some of the new effects.

HINT: I found that using the keyboard left and right arrow keys was an effective method of repositioning the text edit cursor (an I beam) within the text. This was especially useful after already having selected some characters previously. Using the arrow keys unselected the previous selection and changed the cursor position without risk of deselecting the entire text edit box and jumping out of the text edit mode.


Produced by David Mutch of Visionary Voyager Corporation Pty Ltd Copyright © 1999. All rights reserved.