On Oct 11, 2009, at 7:56 AM, David Knecht ATT wrote:
Terry has clarified what I want. In the past, we have used Canvas to prepare figures for publication. They are usually mixed bitmaps and vector graphics on a letter sized page format. Thus a pure painting program will not work. We take images from our microscope in a bitmap tiff format and use a drawing program to lay out multiple images, then add labels like arrows, scale bars, descriptive text etc. Then the whole thing is saved as a tiff or jpeg at 300 dpi and sent to the journal for publication (hopefully). On the Mac, Canvas was always our first choice for this, and then Deneba decided to stop supporting the Mac version of their software. Corel got out of hte business years ago, so there are really no good commercial drawing/painting programs left for the Mac. You can do it with Photoshop, but it is much easier to use a vector drawing program that can handle images than a painting program that can add objects. Also, that program is a confusing mess to teach to new students in the lab. That is why I am turning to open source to see if I can get the job done that way. The reason I asked for resolution, is that the images we use are often much larger (at 72 dpi) than we need so you have to rescale them to the 4" column size of the journal and it is often easier to specify a resolution to resize all images to the same size than to drag the corners to resize. Also, it clarifies that you are actually increasing the resolution rather than down sampling (as Powerpoint often seems to do). How would I ask the developers to add a box in Object Properties that reads out the resolution of a bitmapped image? It would be very useful for people like me.
Interesting. Have you perhaps looked into Scribus for at least some aspects of this? It is a good prepress application, and preparing for print is what it is focused on. At least some of the workflow might be easier in that application.