UG Network _/_ UG Library _/_ Fermoyle_/_ About Ken Fermoyle
Ken Fermoyle: Upgrading?


Corel Offers Good Deal
In Magic Gallery Bundle

by Ken Fermoyle

I have been a clipart collector and user since long before digital graphics came on the scene, for nearly 50 years, in fact. We clipped images from big binders full of pages supplied regularly for a fee by graphics services in those days. Today, you can buy huge collections of clipart on CD-ROM disks for not much more than the fee such a service charged for a month or two back then.

One CD collection comes from Corel: Gallery Magic 200,000, which actually includes a lot more than just clipart: at least 105,000 piece of vector art, 80,000 professional photos, 15,000 Web images, 1,000 fonts, 200+ sound and 100+ video clips.

What really sweetens the deal are the utilities in the bundle: Bitstream Font Navigator, Corel Capture, Video for Windows and Windows Sound Finder, bitmap and vector graphic editors, plus slide show and album creation applets.

The result is a complete multimedia package with a treasure trove of resources, plus tools to help you manage them-all for a price of about $60. Considering that Bitstream Font Manager alone runs approximately $40, this means you get a whole bunch of useful graphics, sound and video bites for very little money! (Ed. Note: Font Navigator also comes bundled with Corel Draw 8 and Ventura 8.)

A word about Font Navigator: it is one of the best font management tools available today. That's the opinion of Rick Altman, honcho of the CorelWorld User Conferences for the past 10 years and all-around guru on graphics and publishing.

It isn't absolutely necessary to have Bitstream Font Navigator to use TrueType fonts successfully, but it sure makes life a lot easier. It lets you install, remove and find fonts. You can use it to create packs, or groups, of your favorite or specialized fonts, and view or print individual or group font information.

And it performs all these tasks with the greatest of ease. This is important because...

The number of fonts Win9X can configure is limited only by the amount of disk space available. Unbelievably, you can use and print approximately 1,000 fonts in any given document. (But please don't; that is 'way Too Much Of A Good Thing!) If you have anywhere near this number of fonts actually installed, however, they will take up valuable memory and slow your system's performance.

There's a scenario that allows you to keep your installed fonts to a reasonable minimum, yet have as many as you want readily available when you need them. Font Navigator plays a major role in this scenario, spelled out at http://www.altman.com/august.htm. (This scenario is also included in one of my seminars, "Fonts: Managing the Mess," at the 1998 North America CorelWorld User Conference during October in San Diego.) Check out Altman's "Fighting the Font Wars" article at www.altman.com/august/htm.

Now back to the clipart portion of the 200,000 Magic Gallery. It's good stuff. Often when you get a big collection of clipart and photos like this, the quality is spotty. Not so in this case. All the vector art I've tried to date has been crisp, sharp and generally well done. Third-party clipart licensed to Corel and included in this collection comes from solid, established graphics houses: 3G Graphics Inc., Archive Arts, Cartesia Software, Image Club Graphics Inc., One Mile Up Inc. and Techpool Studios Inc.

I haven't used the bit-mapped Web images as much, but it appears to be of consistently good quality also; the 1,000+ fonts, likewise.

All art and fonts are shown in an inch-and-a-quarter thick book, though admittedly in thumbnails so tiny I sometimes resorted to a magnifying glass to examine them. All the art and sound and video clips are catalogued by categories in an extensive Table of Contents.

Gallery Magic supports a big variety of graphics file formats, both vector and bit-mapped, including virtually all of the most popular ones: CGM, EPS, WMF, GEM, WPG, CDR, DRW and PIC, to name a few vector formats. Bit-mapped formats include BMP, CPT, TIF, PCX, TGA, JPG, GIF and more.

The vector and bit-mapped image editors in the package are definitely lite versions, not to be confused with CorelDraw or Photo-Paint, but they're adequate for basic chores. The Gallery Magic wizard provides easy access to the clipart, photos, sound and video, while the album features offer an easy way to create, navigate and display albums from the Magic Gallery desktop.

All in all, this package is a good one, and an excellent value, in my opinion. The combination of a ton of very good clipart and the outstanding Font Navigator utility alone, never mind the extra added attractions, make it a bargain. It's bumped a few lesser clipart collections off my system.

Ken

Copyright 1998 by Ken Fermoyle, Fermoyle Publications.

Ken Fermoyle has written some 2,500 articles for publications ranging from Playboy, PC World and Popular Science to MacWeek & Microtimes. He was cohost/producer of a radio show on computers and a partner in a DTP service bureau during the '80s. Ken's Korner articles are available free to User Group newsletters and Websites. For permission to reprint this article, contact kfermoyle@earthlink.net.


EDITORS NOTE: Only UGNN Affiliate User Groups are granted a one-time reproduction license of this article so long as the unaltered credit/ID paragraph (above) is published with the article, and a copy of the printed article is mailed to
Fermoyle Publication
22250 Capulin Court,
Woodland Hills, CA 91364-3005.
Contact: kfermoyle@earthlink.net for further information


Articles posted here by UGNetwork News staff, or the UGN News Service may be reproduced ONLY after your group has become a registered Network affiliate. Register at: http://www.user-groups.com/UGCommunity/UGRegister.html. Contact the UGNet-News for authorization and the UGNet News Affiliate publicity package. Thank you. Copyright 1995, 1996, 1997, The User Group Network, and on behalf of the respective authors. All of this content, and the associated services are donated through the generous efforts of members from the User Group community. This content area is provided by The User Group Network News Service, and is sponsored by The Design & Publishing Center as a public service.