Throughout its long history Deneba Canvas has always been something of an also-ran. While CorelDRAW, Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand battled it out for the drawing application crown, Canvas has stayed on the sidelines. The reason is simple. While the big three concentrate almost exclusively on vector power, Canvas takes a much wider view attempting to provide an all-round integrated graphics solution that embraces drawing, painting, photo-editing, DTP and even business presentation. Thats a lot of ground to cover, and it has left Canvas open to the criticism that its the Jack of all trades and master of none. With Canvas 7, Deneba puts that argument to rest once and for all.

When you first load the program, considering the huge range of creative power it offers, the Canvas interface is surprisingly uncluttered with just a small toolbox and clear workspace. Dig a little deeper, however, and the power soon becomes apparent. Click on a tool, for example, and a flyout appears. With some tools, such as the dimensioning tools, you even have flyouts within flyouts, though these can always be torn off to float on-screen when you need them to hand. Its the same with palettes. Canvas now offers no less than 20 of these from its new centralised Palettes submenu, and several, such as the Inks palette, offer multiple tabbed pages.

Suddenly, rather than simple and clean, the Canvas environment is beginning to look overrun. In practice, though, the user always remains in control thanks to the docker toolbar. Floating palettes and torn-off toolboxes can be dropped onto this docker and they automatically minimise down to their title tab. You can always drag them back off again when you need them or, alternatively, you can click on the title to temporarily open the palette, do what you want to do and then click elsewhere on-screen to minimise the palette and clear your workspace. New commands give more control by letting you dock all open palettes, order docked palettes alphabetically and control the size of tabs.

The new Navigator palette works very much like the feature in Photoshop and Illustrator, displaying a thumbnail version of the current image and indicating the current view as a superimposed rectangle. This View box can be repositioned to enable interactive panning but, surprisingly, theres no way to drag a new rectangle on-screen to change the current zoom level. Instead, this is left to separate Zoom In and Zoom Out palette commands along with the new Fit to Selection, Fit to Objects and Fit to Window commands. Very welcome to anyone who has had to produce designs with upside-down or perpendicular elements, is the ability to rotate the view in 90-degree increments.

More control of the on-screen display comes from the new Display Options command where you can set the display of guides, text flow bars, spelling errors, rulers and so on, all from the one dialog. The dialog also allows you to automatically downsample high-resolution bitmaps as theyre imported, to speed up screen redrawing. Even more impressive is the new Cache Selection command, which lets you substitute a low-resolution screen image for complex objects or groups, resulting in much faster screen redraw. Other ways of speeding redraw include the ability to temporarily hide or lock layers - a capability now extended to individual objects.
The easiest way of managing this for both layers and objects is with the completely revamped Document Layout palette. Previously this palette was restricted to showing the layers in an image, but now it shows a hierarchical layout list of all pages, layers and objects throughout the document. As well as toggles for controlling the display, lock, print and colour override status for all elements, the palette has a Find box so that you can type in a few letters to jump between all matching objects in your document.

Once an object or multiple objects have been selected, you can quickly drag and drop them between pages and layers. With the ability to re-order, add or delete pages, objects or layers, the Document Palette soon becomes a major focus of work in Canvas 7 and adds to the programs general feeling of streamlined efficiency.

New and improved tools
Just as important as the interface is core drawing power and this is an area that Canvas 7 fully addresses with three new path tools. The first of these is the AutoCurve tool that automatically creates smooth Bzier curves as you click and drag. Even with the AutoCurve tool, the shape you create might not be exactly what you had in mind, which is where the Reshape tool comes in. Using this, you can simply draw a new line near the currently selected object and Canvas intelligently incorporates it.

Alternatively, you can switch to the new Push tool, which lets you massage your object into shape as if it were made of clay.
As well as its path tools, Canvas has also revamped its shape tools. A new option has been added to the existing Oval, Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Arc and Line tools whereby, if you just click on the image, a dialog appears in which you can set relevant parameters such as the desired width, height, length and angle. Even more useful is the new EasyShapes tool which, through flyouts, gives access to no less than 58 new objects from thought bubbles through to lightning flashes. The main use of these EasyShapes is for the creation of corporate graphics with a wide range of geometric objects and arrows ideal for flow diagrams. Particularly useful in this regard is the ability to add text to each EasyShape simply by selecting and typing, and a special edit mode which, for example, allows the size of the arrow head to be easily controlled independently of its line.

Another area in which Canvas already excels is technical drawing, thanks to existing features such as comprehensive scaling control, micron-level precision and symbol management. This capability has been extended further with the new Drawing Snap feature. When you select a drawing tool, you can now select any existing object and automatically ensure that the object you now add is parallel or perpendicular to it, or encompassed or centred within it. Alternatively, you can select any object and send it to the guide layer where all objects will automatically snap to it. Even more regularly useful is the new instant access to the major alignment commands through the right-click Context menu.

One aspect of technical drawing that Canvas hasnt previously tackled is the issue of perspective. Now you can select any object and, with the Path |||| Perspective submenu, choose to distort it based on either a one- or two-sided perspective. As you drag the objects bounding box, guidelines appear to indicate the position of the current vanishing point. Once this has been established for the current document, you can select any number of other objects and automatically apply the same vanishing point so that its simple to create consistent and accurate pseudo-3D images. The Canvas implementation isnt as powerful as FreeHand 9s live perspective effects, but it will certainly be enough for most users.

Where Canvas leaves FreeHand in its wake is with its extrusion capabilities. Using the revamped Extrude palette you can now select any object and quickly create the illusion of depth with a range of parallel and circular extrusion presets. Once created, you can interactively drag on-screen to control the apparent depth of the object and also rotate it accurately within 3D space. You can also now apply a range of lighting presets or expand the palette to control this precisely, right down to the light colour and its ambient intensity. The real beauty of the effects are that they remain completely editable so that the objects colour and shading can be instantly changed. Even better, double-clicking on the object takes you back into Extrusion edit mode where you can fin