Canvas 5

Canvas 5 is the first PC version of a long-standing Mac drawing package. In the past the program suffered in comparison with market leaders like Illustrator and FreeHand, but in the jump from version 3.5 to 5 a lot has changed. The latest Canvas has completely re-invented itself as an all-round graphics solution offering drawing, painting, DTP and even presentation graphics. Unlike existing suites like CorelDraw!, all these functions are offered from within one program.

In spite of these new areas of functionality, Canvas is still primarily a drawing program, and as such the core of the program remains its toolbox. This offers the traditional lines, ovals and rectangles, together with a few more modern variations for producing grids, polygons, circular starbursts and so on.

Not so traditional is the ability to add connector lines to objects that then remain linked even when the objects are repositioned. Connector lines are useful for knocking up simple flow diagrams, but they also help in serious technical drawing.

With an accuracy to 0.5 microns, the ability to set a scale between drawing and real life units, 17 advanced dimensioning tools and a customisable 'smart mouse' snap facility, Canvas can even claim to be a CAD solution.

In keeping with this technical feel, Canvas offers a number of CAD-like formatting features. For example, the controls over a line's dashes and arrows are the most comprehensive I've seen. For object fills, there are a number of preset colours, hatching patterns, gradient and textures available from a fly-out palette accessed from the toolbox. Disappointingly, there seemed to be no possibility for customisation - but then I realised that a host of new controls become available if the palette is dragged off the toolbox. For example, colours can be specified for solid fills with models including CMYK, RGB, Pantone and TruMatch.

Once an object has been added and formatted, it can be transformed in a number of ways. Bounding box handles enable interactive resizing, rotation and skewing, while floating palettes allow the same transformations to be set precisely, and also offer more advanced effects like enveloping and blending. The Canvas implementation of extrusion is particularly powerful, including circular and sweep options that can turn a circle into a sphere. The resulting object can then be fully rotated in 3D space and its apparent lighting source controlled.

Objects, DTP and more

Object handling is equally comprehensive. Selected objects can be aligned on each other, grouped, ungrouped and combined in several ways. The combinations include masking, intersecting, slicing, mixing and even a limited form of transparency where new objects with intermediate colouring are produced. For more complex drawings it's possible to lock objects or to copy them to their own layers to prevent unintentional editing and to speed up screen redraw.

One clever use of layers is in the production of business graphics. When you create a new document you can specify it as a presentation, in which case you can add slides instead of layers to a drawing. Transitions can then be set up between these slides, and the resulting presentation can be run as a show or saved as a QuickTime movie. However, the lack of outlining, animation or charting facilities means that Canvas is distinctly under-powered as a potential replacement for PowerPoint.

At this stage, Canvas is looking very much like a standard drawing package - capable but hardly exciting. However, there are two other features that hide an immense amount of power: the text tool and the ability to handle multiple page documents with multiple columns.