| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ PAO/PRESSE ★ GRAPHICS GALORE ★ |
Graphics Galore (Amstrad Action) | GRAPHICS GALORE (Amstrad Computer User) |
Desktop publishing is a neat way of printing your own posters, newsletters and fanzines. DTP packages such as Stop Press allow you to combine text with graphics, making your prose more interesting to look at. But where do you get the pictures from in the first place? The problem is getting the illustration onto the CPC. Real pictures need to be either digitised or scanned - requiring expensive hardware. Alternatively you could draw your own -knock up a quick mono illustration in Art Studio, and import it into your DTP program. However, not everybody has an artistic bent. Besides, it could take ages to draw each individual picture. Wouldn't it be nice to have a whole collection of ready-made pictures that could be imported easily into your work? Something that someone else has taken the time and trouble to draw, and could simply be merged in at your lesuire? Goldmark has taken public domain clip art collections from computers such as the PC, Atari ST and Mac, and converted them to the CPC. Hey presto - an instant library of potentially thousands of bits of artwork. The pictures themselves are fine. The clip art collections cover virtually every subject under the sun. You'll find flags, pianos, rabbits - just about anything you can possibly think of. They are grouped together in sets of 56, roughly divided into alphabetical order. This means that each collection tends to offer many similar pictures. After all, how many pictures of light bulbs are you going to want? The clip art collections costs £12 apiece. There are 37 in total, so it would cost you well over £400 to get the lot. Obviously you're not going buy the whole lot, and neither will you want to pick them by trial and error. Luckily, there's also a catalogue available from Goldmark. It costs £1.25 and includes printouts of all the clip art available. The Graphics Galore collections are overpriced. All the pictures are commonly available in the public domain on other computers, and it is hard to see how the £12 per set of pictures can be justified. If Goldmark was to offer more pictures for less (it says that it can fit 12 libraries on each disk) then it may be more worthwhile. But at present, with only 56 bits of artwork for each £12, it's just too expensive. AA |
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