Canvas 6™ Technical Manual Project Project Overview - Part One

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The following is a step-by step tutorial outlining how to make a technical manual suitable either for print or for screen display as an Adobe® Acrobat® PDF file (Portable Document Format). more about PDF

I stress the use of Adobe Acrobat PDF format for output not just for screen displays and distribution over the Internet, but also as a bona fide means for print output. There is a b industry-wide trend at this time towards PDF as the output format of choice.

The project is a four page document. Below are thumbnails of the pages. Click on any page to see an enlargement:

The text of the document is of no importance. It is "lorem ipsum" nonsense. The important things are:

a.) The layout - An orderly and readable arrangement of text and graphics.
b.) The small, compact size as a PDF for easy distribution over the Internet.

This tutorial involves:
a.) Creating a new document from scratch
b.) Building master pages and linking text
c.) Importing and arranging text and images
d.) Creating new colors and applying them to objects
e.) Factors in making PDFs from Canvas documents

An earlier tutorial mentioned the importance of planning ahead when doing any new project. Planning for distribution as a PDF drives this point home.

Page Layout With Deneba Canvas

Deneba Canvas has the familiar look and feel of a page layout program. Like other programs that use a pasteboard, the pages are at the center of a layout area with horizontal and vertical rulers running alongside it. It supports master pages and layers and it has a good collection of text editing and typography controls as well as support for image proxies to keep file sizes down. It has all the necessary features for precise placement of objects to within 1/100th of a point. Objects can be made to snap to either a user definable grid or individual page guides which you can either drag from the rulers (alignment guides) or place as lockable alignment objects that can be precisely positioned like any other object. When you have finished your layout and are ready to send it to a service bureau for output it has a "Collect For Output" feature which collects all the document and image files and fonts together.

Users Of Other Page Layout Programs

For users of QuarkXPress™ and other page layout programs, although Deneba Canvas doesn't have everything they have to offer yet (newer and better versions are always in the works), it does have several key advantages which makes it a good choice for many of your page layout projects:

1. There is full Bezier editing capability for vector objects while working on your layout. There is no need to leave the application to create or edit vector objects.

2. There is built-in support for transparent drop shadows and other special effects like stroked type, text envelopes, etc. without the need for additional programs or costly program extensions. These effects will render perfectly as PostScript® outlines in printed output and they can be rendered in combination with high resolution bitmaps.

3. You can place and edit images directly without the need for an external image editor. No outside image prep is necessary.

4. Additionally, Canvas supports transparency in GIF89a images so you don't need to create clipping paths or save these images as EPS files.

5. By eliminating the need for external EPS files, there is no danger of missing or mismatched fonts or colors. This cuts down the possibility of a "surprise" extra printing plate where colors defined in the EPS files don't match the ones in the document. It can still happen, but the image is right there available for inspection.

6. Another big advantage over QuarkXPress is the fact that Canvas 6 supports the RGB color space for printing. If you elect to print to Adobe Acrobat Distiller®, it is not necessary to save images as RGB EPS files in order to preserve RGB colors. In this case, for color consistency when using QuarkXPress, the images used in the document would need to be saved as RGB EPS images when printing the document in PDF format. If you were to generate a PDF from any Quark™ document using Distiller (whether or not you first save it to file or print directly to the Distiller printer driver) the color in GIF images will get "washed out".
   
   Note: The workaround described here applies to QuarkXPress versions 4.0 and earlier. Version 4.1 now supports printing with the RGB color space.
   

7. Additionally, you can save Canvas files directly to PDF rather than having to use File > Print to either the Acrobat Distiller or Acrobat PDFWriter® drivers.

What You Will Need For This Tutorial

Following is an outline of what you will need to complete this tutorial:

1. First, you need a copy of Deneba Canvas 6. This tutorial is setup for version 6 but it could feasibly be done with version 5. However, due to the many program enhancements version 6 offers over version 5 there would be a considerable  number of changes. You would need to understand the concept of each step and work out the differences.

2. For those of you who wish to output the document as a PDF using Distiller, you will need a copy of Adobe Acrobat version 3.x or 4.x (not the free Reader, but the full Acrobat package).

3. All fonts used are Type 1 (PostScript). Windows® users will need Adobe Type Manager® to use them. Although you can use any fonts you wish, these are the fonts used in this tutorial:

Substitute Fonts:

* Font packages may vary. Check it out for yourself before buying anything.

Although Canvas 6 supports TrueType® fonts, most service bureaus only support PostScript fonts. Additionally, it is always better to use Type 1 fonts when outputting to PDF. For this exercise we will stick to Type 1. Strictly speaking, when submitting files to a service bureau, all fonts should be from Adobe (manufactured by Adobe) rather than merely being "Adobe Type 1" specification. For this reason Adobe Helvetica-Black would be a better choice than URWGroteskT Bold.

Document Text

You can copy the following text from your browser: Drag your mouse to select the text, then press Ctrl-C (Windows) or Cmd-C (Mac®) to copy it. Then open a new text file with Notepad (Windows) or SimpleText (Mac) and press Ctrl-V to paste the text into the file. Then save the file.

Tutorial Images

The "bulb" image:



The "screen shot" image:




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