I am a lousy artist. I hang around engineers a lot (not the railroad kind, but the guys that like to
do mathematics using imaginary complex numbers). The engineers my age all took mechanical
drafting courses when they were in high school and college. I have trouble signing my name
legibly, and have no hope of drawing a straight line even with a ruler. These guys can whip out
an envelope or napkin and a chewed up #2 pencil and start doing freehand drawing as good as a
CAD program can produce.
But, I do a lot of documentation and specifications, and every now and then, a picture is really
worth a thousand words. Most of the graphics that I need to produce are line drawings: boxes,
circles, the lines connecting them, and some text in and around them. Stuff like this can be used
to outline how a program would work, and how the logical paths produce a desired output from a
specified input. (Garbage In, Garbage Out comes to mind here, but sometimes you do have a
pearl or two as your input, with a corresponding gemstone as the output.)
I have had the happy opportunity to hang around a Real Technical Writer in the last few years,
the talented Dodds, James Dodds, whom I have referred to a couple of times in these pages.
Since he is generally doing end user guides for us, he includes lots of graphics, and most of them
are either screen images or drawings of the equipment we are dealing with or of how the
particular program he is describing fits into our manufacturing plants. Nothing I have done, at
least in the graphical business, holds a shadow to what Mr Dodds is able to produce.
The interesting thing is, we both use the exact same software product for graphics. It works well
for what I want to do (line drawings) and he seems to feel comfortable using it to produce his
much more elaborate presentations. It did take a little effective persuasion when he first joined
us, because he was a committed Macophillic, but once we beat the Mac out of him and showed
him that the PC too had a graphical capability and more or less has a clone of all his beloved
Macky Mouse tools, he came around. That, plus the entirely logical consideration that he
wouldn't get paid if he handed stuff in done by a Mac instead of a PC made him an enthusiastic
user of PC software.
The graphics packages that are available can be grouped into about three different classes.
First you have the Bitmapped painting programs, like the free program named Paint that comes
with Windows, or the more elaborate Corel Photo-Paint. These programs store their pictures in a
matrix of bits where each bit corresponds to a pixel on the final printed page. To draw a line, the
program turns on a series of bits in its memory just like you would X in the cells of a piece of
graph paper to make a straight line. Unfortunately, unless the line is exactly horizontal or
vertical, you will never be able to generate an exact representation of a straight line, but only an
approximation with little jaggies bumping out here and there. The other problem is if you need
to make the graphic larger or smaller, you will be expanding or compressing your bitmaps, often
resulting in your graphic looking real weird as the program tries to multiply the bits by 1.5.
However, these program are rather easy to use, so easy that very young kids seems to get the idea
of how to splat colors around on a page in a very short, like in a few minutes, of time. The
graphics can usually be enhanced by the process of fatbits, where you have control over each
individual pixel in a seriously zoomed in section of the graphic.
Second you have the Vector programs that store all the graphic objects as a series of
mathematical formulae internally, and only generate the final graphic when you need to produce
your output image. The good news is, jaggies are reduced down to the resolution of the output
device, which is not uncommonly 600dpi on a laserjet nowadays. The bad news is, these
programs are much more difficult to get the hang of, since you are not now just manipulating a
bucket of bits, but tweaking a blackboard full of formulae, albeit with a mouse manipulating
object control points. There are a number of such programs out there; I (and Mr Dodds) both
seem comfortable with Corel Draw. It is rather expensive, having a street price of about $300.
Third, you have the Computer Aided Design (CAD) programs out there. I am planning on doing
a whole article on these one of these days, but suffice it to say that you can purchase these
programs in a range of $10 to $3000, depending on features and ease of use.
There are other sorts of programs out there too, that don't really fit into these categories. There
are scanner fiddler programs, programs that exist to enhance and modify a scanned in image,
generally a photograph. There are the flowchart programs (Visio being one of the most well
known) that let you plug together a series of predefined objects to make a final chart. Org Plus is
another program that does Organizational Charts and does them well. Programmers have
available graphic programs to do Computer Aided Software Engineering designs, such as entity
relationship diagrams. There are other narrow focused graphic programs that do business charts,
generating pie charts and line charts and the like from spreadsheet or database data.
My first experience using any of these tools was back in the late 60's, when the only kind of
graphics you could do was to write a program using a subroutine library provided either by your
plotter manufacturer or some independent company. As a programmer, I did not see a problem
with this, but the rest of the world was seriously left out. Few of these programs let you first
view your chart on a crt screen, but generally made you print or plot your graphic, and that
generally took quite a long time, because these devices were not yet rasterized like today's laser
printers are.
Not much changed for the next 10 years, until the microprocessor revolution occurred. At World
Wide Widgets, which was then completely committed to Big Blue IBM, we never got our paws
on any of these devices till the somewhat later IBM PC became available. We being mostly
engineers immediately bought a CAD program for it, thinking that was what we would useit for
the most. I tried using this sort of program for producing line drawings and the like, and it was
miserable. Partly because it was a new paradigm shift for me (don't get to use that phrase much)
and partly because the tools were very new and primitive. There was very little in the way of
export, and no word processors on the early machines would import any graphics.
By the time 8 years later when I got my hands on an early version of Corel Draw ( I have been
using it since Version 1, when they still supplied a video tape to show you how to use the
product) I finally saw what a useful tool a program like this could be. I had been doing a lot of
writing, and from time to time I would have somebody professionally draw up a graphic for my
text, but then the problem was keeping this separate graphic page available when you went to
modify the text of the main document. It was easy to keep the text on a floppy, but you had to
keep the actual original hard copy of the graphic somewhere where you could find it, so that you
could manually insert it into your document when you distributed it. With Corel Draw, and
Wordperfect 5 (even for DOS), the graphic could be imported into the actual document, and
would not get lost as you made revisions.
The toolbox in Corel Draw is very simple: about six selections, compared to maybe dozens
available in CAD and Paint programs. Using these simple tools, you place objects on your
drawing board. But each object can be fiddled with using the property lists available for that
object, giving you an enormous amount of control over your final drawing.
Consider drawing a line. You click on the line object. You click at some point on the graphic
world space, and then click again at another point, and a line appears between the two points.
You want a bigger line? You can get a properties dialog box that has all sorts of line sizes,
makes it a solid or dotted or dashed line, makes the ends of the line square or round, and tacks on
one of about 50 arrowheads and arrowtails to the line. You can change the color of the line from
another dialog box, and the degree of fill of the line from yet another one. You want the line to
have a gradation of colors? No problem, there is another property to do that too.
The line endpoints can be locked to a grid (or not), can be restricted to be only at some multiple
of 45 degrees (or not) and can be locked to some other object on the graphic (or not). The line
itself can be later broken in the middle, so that you can insert a bend, or another object. Or the
line can be connected to other lines, eventually to totally enclose a space, which can itself then be
filled with a color (or not).
The same sorts of things apply to boxes, circles, and text, the only other graphic drawing tools
available on the toolbar. There is a bit of a learning curve to using this product. I have
progressed up the learning curve to the point of applying these four object types to generate the
documentation line drawings that I need. However, if you really want to put yourself into it, you
can produce full color pictorials that any professional graphic artist would be proud of. Or you
could produce the sorts of graphics that Mr Dodds does for us, which we at least are proud of.
The paint programs generally are not generating objects, at least not after the object is laid down
onto the graphic. You just have gobs of bits. Going back and changing your mind later with a
paint program gets awkward. Do you want that line to be fatter, or moved over half an inch, or a
different color? Many (maybe most) paint programs do not let you manipulate an object once
laid down and bolted into the graphic, except to erase it, overlay it, or fatbit it.
So now you have produced a graphic. What do you want to do with it? You basically have two
choices. The graphic program itself can probably produce a hard copy output if you have one
available, or you can take the binary representation of your graphic to a professional shop that
has really neat professional hard copy devices. (See my article on Poster Art in the July issue of
ComputorLink).
Or you can export your graphic into some standard format that can be later imported into some
other program, like a word processor, or slide presentation program. There are a whole load of
such formats, dozens in fact, and they are not really standard, or at least the format exported by
one program is not always imported properly by another program. Corel Draw exports in 27
different formats, including WordPerfect's proprietary format (wpg). WordPerfect itself imports
33 different types, including of course their own wpg format. However, Corel's export doesn't
seem to work for diddly when imported into WordPerfect. I find that cgm format works best,
followed maybe by tiff.
If you should find yourself in the rather awkward position where your graphic exporter has no
match for some program into which you want to import that graphic, there is Hijaak to the
rescue. This program has been around for at least 10 years in different versions, and its main
claim to fame is that it converts almost any graphic format to almost any other graphic format.
Where it draws the line is converting bitmap format to vector. Corel has a program named Trace
that attempts to do this, and does it badly. Hijaak does not even attempt that. But for the formats
that it will process, it does them rather well and efficiently, and it even now has some graphic
manipulation features where you can fiddle with colors and contrasts and the like during the
conversion.
With these programs, any slob can generate output that looks professionally done, at least within
some limits. Pictures do enhance the text of a complex document, although I am not real turned
on by random insertions of clip art, just to have some graphic material in your document.
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