Slashdot Mirror
Canvas 7 beta for Linux - now available
As the title says - Canvas 7 Beta is now available for downloading. This version was ported and compiled using WineLib. RPM, DEB, and TAR.GZ files available (which covers all Linux Distros). Could anyone grab it and post their impressions? These days it seems that the graphics programs market for Linux is heating up :)
Alright, hands up everyone who said "Cool!", downloaded it, then thought "What is it?"
I grabbed it. Seems pretty stable & full featured for a beta. Imports & exports many formats. It's really a vector drawing program so it competes w/ the likes of sketch very successfully. It also seems to have a lot of page layout capabilities.
To run it I had to run their 'wineserver' first & then run canvas7.
Also make sure you use 'unmanaged' windows.
I decided to compare the way they use winelib to the way Wordperfect Office uses winelib. I altered the wpolauncher script to use unmanaged windows. That gives the windows a Win95 look & feel but it makes the WPO applications significantly faster.
Then I noticed something: Wordperfect Office uses wine, not winelib!
Check this out:
[jthomas2@bob programs]$ file wpwin9.exe
wpwin9.exe: MS-DOS executable (EXE), OS/2 or MS Windows
and
[jthomas2@bob programs]$ file prwin9.exe
prwin9.exe: MS-DOS executable (EXE), OS/2 or MS Windows
Compare this to:
canvas7: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped
That explains why some of those corel office applications, especially their presentation app run so slowly!
Someone from Corel want to explain this?
Reality check guys: for the forseeable future, Windows will be the dominant platform. If WineLib is really getting good enough for vendors to port their software using it, then our chances of getting a load of the thousands of good Windows applications ported are greatly improved.
In fact, I could see the Windows API becoming a "commodity platform". That is, with the advent of Wine, we could be a approaching the point where Windows API programs will run in a lot of different places. Further, I can see Linux becoming a significant place to run Windows programs in the near future if Wine gets good enough.
I really think that anything that commoditizes the Win32 API is probably a good thing for the industry, even if we would all prefer native ports. The problem of Microsoft "extending" Win32 periodically would be greatly mitigated if this were the case.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
Corel wanted to use WineLib (and is still planning to for future versions of WPO), but g++ is not yet suitable for general Windows porting. (precompiled headers being probably the largest problem - gcc doesn't have 'em, so large C++ projects take forever to build, as anyone who's compiled KDE knows all too well).
:)
;-)
The problem is exacerbated because Corel's stuff is all based on MFC, and MFC in turn is heavily tied to Visual C++. gcc 2.95.x helps this out by supporting anonymous structs and unions, but the pieces still aren't all in place to do seamless Winelib ports.
Deneba OTOH writes their code in pure C++ with no class libraries (Canvas evidentally can compile on both Windows and the MacOS from a common codebase). They began experimenting with WineLib the last week of December (based on their emails to wine-devel), so they've made excellent progress in a short amount of time. Kudos to them
Disclaimer: I don't work for either Corel or Deneba. Everything in this post was picked up or interpolated from wine-devel mailing list postings. If someone from those companies wants to correct me, please moderate them up
If someone would like to help us distribute Canvas for linux by providing a mirror, please contact mbc@deneba.com
_ ____
Thanks!
_______________________________________________
Michael Cardenas
Lead Linux Programmer
Deneba Software http://www.deneba.com
hyperpoem.net
Late me start out saying that this is great news. I use a Macintosh with LinuxPPC on one drive and MacOS on another. It is the very fact that I have to be in MacOS to use Canvas that keeps me from using LinuxPPC as my default system.
I heavily rely on Canvas for techinical illustrations in my research documents. I draw them in Canvas (6 -- haven't bothered to upgrade to 7 yet), convert them to EPS, and include them in my LaTeX documents. I can draw the graph of a complex 20 state finite automata in 5 minutes with this program. For what I do (your results may vary), there is simply nothing like this program currently available for Linux.
GIMP is a wonderful program, but you must understand what its purpose is. GIMP is an image manipulation program. It is meant to be a freeware replacement to Photoshop. It is for manipulating bitmapped images (Of high resolution) and performing cool effects on them.
Canvas, on the other hand, got its start as a technical illustration tool. Sort of like a poor man's CAD. In many ways it is closer to xfig, though its interface is far superior. All objects are represented as vectors unless they are draw within a image box (A bitmap object). This gives Canvas several features that GIMP is sorely (At least in the stuff that I do) lacking.
Geometric objects (Circles, rectangles, beziers) in Canvas are not bitmapped and hence can be rescaled on the fly with no jaggies or need for antialiasing.
While I am sure Slashdotters will correct me, I believe that object placement in GIMP is visual. You cannot select an object and type in a coordinate for it to move to. You can do this in Canvas relative to your current measurement unit (Points, centimeter, inches, whatever). This allows you to align objects so they will print correctly, as screen resolution is simply not good enough for press.
Text support in GIMP is just too primitive; this is my primary complaint with this program. In Canvas, text remains text. You can always reedit the text after you have bent it around a line, filled it with a gradient, rotated it 234.5 degrees, or whatever. And when you export the image to PDF, the text is still editable there. This is particularly important to me as various publications have different font requirements and I do not want to have to redraw my pictures.
With Canvas 5, Deneba extended their product from a technical illustration to tool to an All-In-One tool. It now can do a lot of what Photoshop does, and hence does compete directly with GIMP in that regard.
As far as I know, Canvas can now do everything that GIMP does. As to how well it does all this (compared to GIMP, Photoshop, or whatever), I cannot tell you that. I just do technical illustrations, not image manipulation.
-Walker