Power CG Plus, Page 4

Tabs For Character Attributes
To change or modify any character attribute, first select the characters you wish to change by left mouse clicking and dragging, then click on the tab folder you want. Let's look at some of the tabs available to you:

 
Character tab (Click for larger image)

The Character tab lets you change fonts, sizes, rotation and blur for the characters. TIP: If you click/hold on any of the little numerical value windows with the left mouse button and drag the mouse, the values will change dramatically. You can make some rapid changes by using the mouse to click and drag. A new feature with Power CG Plus is the "Cursor Handles". When you turn this feature on, the cursor now has eight handles you can grab and change the size, height, width, italics and position of the character or characters you've selected. These changes can be made right from the work screen. TIP: You can also grab all character attributes by selecting the character on the work screen and saving into the Style Gallery. When you want to use that style again, select the text you wish to change and apply those attributes with one mouse click from the style gallery.

 

Edge tab (Click for larger image)

The Edge tab opens the edge box with complete controls for two separate edges. Each edge can have many of the character attributes, like any color, color gradient or even a texture. You can soften the edge and extrude, highlight, surround or drop shadow it, in any of eight different directions.

 

Shadow tab (Click for larger image)
The Shadow tab gives you three separate shadow to use. Again, most of the character attributes can be applied to shadows as well. The shadows can also take their shape from either a character or an edge. So if you have a sharp edged character and want to put a colored shadow around it that's sharp, then assign one shadow to take its shape from the character. If you want the second shadow to be soft -- like a soft edge -- you can do that as well. With two edges and three shadows we've been able to build nice neon characters with rounded looking edges and a multiple of shadow/edge looks.

The Shapes tab allows the building of shapes, what else! These shapes can be of different shapes and sizes and, as mentioned before, can use all of the character attributes like color, edges, shadows, etc. We use this tab to build borders around images, background color gradient boxes or separators built with color gradations between areas of a page.

 
Color tab (Click for larger image)
The Color tab is where we spend lots of time having fun. Yes, you can select your characters and choose "a" color but that's boring! With Power CG Plus, you can produce 4 or 5 point Area gradients for backgrounds, shapes, edges or shadows. If you're really adventurous, apply a Linear gradient. A linear gradient can be from one color to any number of other colors or shades of color, in any direction. So if you want your character face to be a rainbow hue of color on a diagonal, not a problem. The color tab also has a color picker, color sliders in RGB (red, blue, green) and HLS (hue, luminance, saturation), video and background transparency sliders as well as the standard color palette window where you can create your own custom color palettes, up to 64 per page. The Color tab is also where you can apply a texture to any characters, shadows, or edges. A note here that any color gradient you create can be saved in its own separate gradient gallery.

There are other tabs we haven't mentioned: Position, Backgrounds, Logos, Row Spacing and On Air.

The Position tab allows minute changes in any selected character's position by the row, layer or page including justification. You can still drag and drop with the right mouse button on the work screen, but this tab will center or justify for you easier.

The Background tab allows you to bring in a color background or a picture image using the most popular file types like .tga, .tif, .bmp and more. The background can be full screen or sized.

With the Logos tab you can make your own logos from a picture image and import it in, up to 16 per page. We use this feature for charge card images or when a customer has custom images needed for bullet points, like weather logos showing rain or sunshine.

Lastly, the On-Air tab allows you to set up a slide show and choose the transitions between each image. The presentation comes directly off the hard drive of your computer in real time, so you don't have to sit around and render a demo to videotape. I think this feature may be of interest to event videographers. For those of you who have a waiting room in your office where customers can look over some of your work, having a computer monitor running a demo of your pages would certainly put you one step ahead of your competition. You could even customize the presentation if you wanted to. No other CG program has this capability.

1. Beginning of Article
2: Quick Tour
3: Using Power CG
4: Tabs For Character Attributes
 5: Text F/X
6: Conclusions

Next: 5. Text F/X