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DENEBA CANVAS GAINED ITS REPUTATION AS A GRAPHICS "JACKKNIFE," a software program integrating drawing, painting and text tools in a single application. Now in version 6.0, Canvas still does the best draw-paint-text integration around, and for an estimated street price of $375. That doesn't mean you should ditch Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDraw or QuarkXPress. But certain projects combining digital photos, text and drawing may well come out quicker and better on Canvas, given some new features and tighter integration of functions. For example, version 6.0 adds sprite-based transparency channel masking along with extensive transparency control, both of which make it very easy to overlay objects and control the ways you can "see through" them. More about these further on.
Canvas actually sports three customized interfaces, for three different "document types." To start a new document in Cancas 6, you first click New under the File menu, as you'd expect. But before seeing a blank document you must next choose a "document type," either illustration, Publication or Presentation. Deneba gears Illustration for predominantly graphical works. Publication for predominantly text and Presentation," for generating slide shows.
Start a new "Publicatio" for example, or switch to an existing one, and a special text-editing tool bar appears across the top f the document window. Also, the Document Layout palette for "Publications," which works roughly like Photoshop's layers" control, sports a Master page, so that you can build repeating page elements on a "Master" page (and layers within the Master page) and apply them to any other page. Neither of these Publication features, though, will appear in an Illustration document, although you can do the same type of text formatting using other palettes and menus. Also, you can't change a document's "type," say from Illustration to Publication; you're stuck with your first choice. The Presentation...