New Programs Help Illustrate a Point

Professional artists, amateurs and the rest of us who would be thrilled just to sketch something pleasing to the eye can benefit greatly from illustration software.

Micrografx Designer ($695) is a serious tool for the serious artist. It replaces pencils, pens, airbrushes and maybe even Macintoshes and is published by Micrografx Inc. of Richardson, Tex., (800) 733-3729.

Arts & Letters Graphics Editor ($695) is also a serious tool but is aimed at the can’t-draw-a-straight-line crowd. It will make an artist of anyone with a PC and is published by Computer Support Corp. of Dallas, (214) 661-8960.

Both are “drawing” as distinguished from “paint” programs. That means they are capable of producing smooth curves and images that can be scaled up or down and manipulated in other ways. Paint program images are much more limited.

They also are both for IBM and compatible machines and must be used with Microsoft’s Windows program, which provides the underlying graphics environment in which they run.

Arts & Letters provides a huge library of predrawn images that are easily called to the screen, freely combined and manipulated.

It is a sophisticated sort of clip-art where you can change the size, color and shape of images with a few flourishes of the mouse. Although you can use any of the images that come with Arts & Letters as is, they are easily modified to suit your own style and vision. Some 5,000 images come with the program, and if that isn’t enough, you can buy at least 10,000 more.

Some art forms are illustrations--a highway meandering across a hilly landscape, for instance. Others are pictorials, such as drawings of makes of automobiles or airplanes. There are icons, which are simplified objects useful in dressing up a report, as well as maps, flags and even cartoons.

Optional libraries of art forms are available for medicine, zoology, computers, electronics, aerospace and other fields.

All these objects and the 50 different kinds of type styles in the program can be enlarged, squeezed, flattened, distorted, rotated and flopped to your heart’s content. And colored, too. You can create the necessary color separations to have your work professionally printed in full color.

Micrografx Designer, which was one of the first Windows drawing programs and keeps getting more powerful, is not fundamentally a clip-art program, although it does come with an excellent library of about 1,700 images.

Instead, its approach to art creation is to provide lots of on-screen tools with which to create any image. These tools take the form of various kinds of “objects” that, grouped together by an artist, can create an illustration of any degree of complexity.

For instance, there are various rectangles, rounded rectangles, irregular-shaped polygons, circles, ellipses and curved lines to work with. The most powerful--and unusual--curved line is known as a Bezier curve, from the mathematician whose formula describes it. What makes it unusual is the way you can control its shape by moving control points along tangents to the curve.

As powerful as its freehand drawing abilities are, and its clip-art images, a feature called auto tracing is probably the biggest timesaver.

The auto tracing routine allows you to import other images, such as scanned pictures or maps, or even images made with paint programs that cannot be manipulated, and turn them into fully controllable Designer images.

Computer File welcomes readers’ comments but regrets that the author cannot respond individually to letters. Write to Richard O’Reilly, Computer File, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, Calif. 90053.