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ArtWorks 2.3 slated for Guildford show release

By Chris Williams. Published: 23rd Sep 2004, 16:16:48.

CMYK ink simulation and more

Example of graduated transparency in AW 2.3

MW Software are intending to release ArtWorks 2.3 at next month's RISC OS South East show in Guildford, UK.

Version 2.3 of the flagship vector art package will see a number of major new features: graduated transparency support, CMYK ink simulation and the return of the Arranger module, as well as various other improvements and bug fixes.

"Professional users producing artwork for CMYK colour separated printing will enjoy radically improved screen display of CMYK colours and CMYK colour graduations giving a much better on screen approximation of the final printed results using CMYK ink simulation technology as seen in OvationPro (kindly provided by David Pilling)", Martin Wuerthner of MW-Software said earlier today.

"Potential" future features for ArtWorks include PDF export support and a path style panel. MW Software took over development of ArtWorks from Computer Concepts in November 2002.

Links
ArtWorks 2 website - new features, pricing, ordering

Discussion

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what a great program it just gets better and better :-)

leeshep on 23/9/04 5:30PM [ Reply | Report ]

!Artworks is certainly getting better all the time (and since November 2002!?!) PDF Export Support, yes please! I would rather pay a little more for a software package that has all you need than pay for a budget package that has the bare essentials. By this I mean extra features of file type convertors, multiple file type supports (import export !Sprites, jpg, WMF, etc), PDF export, instead of relying on having other software to do the job. !Artworks is certainly getting that way though. ;-)

Sawadee on 24/9/04 5:14AM [ Reply | Report ]

Once again we have a RISC OS killer-app to demonstrate the progress we are making since we're on our own

thanks to Martin Würthner for his commitment

hEgelia on 24/9/04 12:20PM [ Reply | Report ]

The only issue with PDF export is that it's quite nice to have an app independent way of generating PDFs (via the printer drivers) from apps that produce vector based graphics. In that way, you can generate PDFs from any app, not just ArtWroks.

jonix on 24/9/04 3:02PM [ Reply | Report ]

But its nice to have PDF export setup so its a simple one click export option in the Application as well. Its the best feature in OpenOffice.

markee174 on 24/9/04 3:41PM [ Reply | Report ]

jonix: It may be nice to have an application-independent way of exporting PDFs, but this would be of very limited use for ArtWorks - and, in fact, the current method via the PS printer driver is very poor compared to what you could get with direct export. The reason is that an app-independent way has to go through the OS interface, which immediately loses things like transparency and graduated fills and many other things that could be directly expressed in the PDF. The current method of going through the PS driver loses even more things. So, there are three main ways to generate PDFs: 1 via PS printer driver and PS to PDF conversion 2 via a dedicated PDF printer driver (and I am NOT talking about Taborca because that is just a disguised PS printer driver so no different from 1 except that it does not even work at all with ArtWorks) 3 direct PDF export The quality improves significantly as you go from 1 to 2 to 3. Martin

wuerthne on 24/9/04 4:21PM [ Reply | Report ]

Another though: one more thing that is lost by methods 1 and 2 is all advanced colour information, most notably CMYK definitions making the result more or less useless for professional printing. Martin

wuerthne on 24/9/04 4:23PM [ Reply | Report ]

At times I agree with jonix that it is nice to have an app independent PDF or even independent file type convertors. Personally, I just prefer to have these import/export features built in to software packages. I have noticed (as Martin points out) not just with PDF but some independent file converting apps don't always maps colours too well and have noticable quality losses. (Sorry, I can't technically explain it!)

Sawadee on 25/9/04 6:18AM [ Reply | Report ]

Woweee, that's really impressive! Snaps for Martin again, me thinks!

harmsy on 25/9/04 10:40AM [ Reply | Report ]

joty on 25/9/04 12:35PM [ Reply | Report ]

In a world where there is RISC OS development done for the OS, there better coulde enhancements in its graphical model like adding transparency, shadings, CMYK, tagged colorspaces, etc.

joty on 25/9/04 12:41PM [ Reply | Report ]

joty: Transparency and CMYK has been (partly) addressed in RISC OS Select, at least for sprite rendering. Certainly a step in the right direction.

wuerthne on 25/9/04 2:03PM [ Reply | Report ]

Indeed - it's one of the areas that Select has focussed on in its three releases. It's also got alpha-transparency in sprites and proper support for this in PNGs now of course.

Does Artworks support the ImageFileRender protocol? Can Artworks export as bitmap to all the formats supported by Select and import them? That would be useful.

Also - can you use translucent sprites with alpha-transparency on Artworks? (Don't know because sadly I'm still using Artworks 1 - must upgrade some point soon!)

md0u80c9 on 26/9/04 12:17AM [ Reply | Report ]

In reply to wuerthne:

How much support for PDF will there be (ICC, Lab, shading,PDF 1.4/1.5, CID fonts,etc)?

markee174 on 26/9/04 9:19PM [ Reply | Report ]

My view on this is that there are obviously limitations in the OS printing interface and we should perhaps look to have these facilities made available by the OS developers or other interested parties so that any app could make use of them. This may not be practical or economically viable but would anyone disagree that this is the best way forwards?

jonix on 26/9/04 10:46PM [ Reply | Report ]

markee174: I cannot say. I have not announced any PDF support yet. I am puzzled about the reference to 1.4/1.5. You need not "support" a certain format when creating documents - each PDF 1.0 document is a PDF 1.5 document. The question is rather: Can all the required things be expressed using a specific document version - the lower the better.

wuerthne on 27/9/04 2:25PM [ Reply | Report ]

jonix: Yes, there are obviously limitations in the printing interface, but these are relatively minor. The point is that ArtWorks renders many things that are way outside the scope of the OS's rendering interface (and the printing interface is a subset of the rendering interface) and you cannot expect OS support for graduated transparency with graduation profiles and offset control. This is what we have advanced applications for. If it was in the OS, even Draw could do it easily.

wuerthne on 27/9/04 2:29PM [ Reply | Report ]

Yes, I realise that if the OS could do it the advantage of ArtWorks as a commercial package would be somewhat undermined. I see RISC OS as a very modular OS in which components (modules) can be replaced providing they implement the same interface. The RISC OS way of working tends to be to use a collection of small programs to accomplish a larger task - indeed, this is one of its strengths. Let's say I create a TechWriter document with some text and an embedded ArtWorks file that has transparency. I now try to save this TechWriter document as a PDF (using the printer drivers) - what happens to the ArtWorks file? Am I not reasonable to expect that to export to PDF just as well as if I was exporting from ArtWorks itself?

jonix on 27/9/04 4:46PM [ Reply | Report ]

In reply to wuerthne:

I was thinking especially of whether you would need to use layers and transparency to support Artworks features most effectively.

markee174 on 27/9/04 9:24PM [ Reply | Report ]

markee174: Transparency - certainly if the ArtWorks document had transparent objects. Otherwise this is not needed. You would not need layers to retain the appearance of the document (which would be the most important requirement).

wuerthne on 28/9/04 7:17AM [ Reply | Report ]

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