Drawings and pictures for keys

[Jeremy Rice]

>>I need a program (or programs) to draw (literally create drawings) AND im
>>port scanned images, AND combine all this with text and page setup. The
>>resulting document will be printed.
>
>It is very easy to do all this and coordinate it if you use Adobe Photoshop
>for all the image work, and PageMaker for the text and page setup, sending
>the final PageMaker files directly to the printer, as I did for my field
>guide. Very cheap to publish, as well, since you essentially give color
>separations to the printer, instead of having them charge you to do it.

Please pardon my response to the list, but the address on the original message
wasn't quoted.

If you're not interested in graphics, don't bother reading this message.  :)

I'm a professional graphic artist, so I'm somewhat qualified to answer the
original question.

When you say "literally create drawings", I assume you mean -line- art, and
not photorealistic images (like photos, or scanned images).  If this is the
case, you will most likely want to use a program like Adobe ILlustrator (the
latest version is version 8), or CorelDRAW! (which I cannot professionally
recommend).  Illustrator is, by leaps and bounds, the industry standard.  It's
fairly easy to use and learn, but is a bit expensive (over $600 for one copy).

Illustrator is, of course, a professional piece of software, however, and if
your needs are simpler, you could use several other packages instead, from
CorelDRAW! to the basist of all graphic programs: MS PowerPoint.  The latter
is extremely intuitive, fairly cheap, and can also help you in page layout and
text setting (though it's meant more for slides than for fliers, journals,
or other text-heavy applications).

The above recommendation for Adobe Photoshop is a good one.  That is, again,
the standard image-editing software on the market today.

However, if you don't plan to -modify- the images that you scan (beyond simple
cropping and color adjustment), then you might want to consider simply using
the software that comes packaged with the scanner.  That software usually
(read: almost always) allows you to crop, resize, and color-and-balnace adjust
the images, which is enough for basic use.  In fact, many scanners are now
coming with a crippled version of Photoshop (usu. called "Photoshop LE").

If you're budget is a small one and you still need heavy image-editing power,
try the very low-cost program: Painter.  Very simple to use, too.  I've only
heard people sing it's praises.  It's just not a standard image-editing tool
with the pro's.

Lastly: page layout.  Adobe PageMaker (mentioned above) is a good choice,
especially if you want to stick to one vendor (Adobe).  However, the industry
standard is Quark XPress, which is an excellent, -excellent- piece of
software.  Also, any printing shop will readily accept Quark files for output
...on practically any medium.

However, there's also a low-end way to go with page layout: MS Word.  Believe
it or not, more and more people are using Word to do their page layouts.
Pasting images into Word documents is fairly easy and extremely
well-documented otherwise.

...That should be an adequate overview of the desktop publishing market today.
If you have any other questions, I'm always available at jrice at texterity.com

All of these suggestions are assuming you're using either a Macintosh or a
32-bit PC machine (Win95 or NT).  If you're in a Unix environment, the playing
field changes -entirely- (if it even exists at all...  We use Solaris for
graphic output, but only for books and other gargantuan projects; scanning
is difficult on unix machines, too).

Thanks.  And again, I'm sorry for posting this to the entire list--it would
have been more approriate as a private message.

------
Jeremy Rice