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HALIFAX AREA PERSONAL COMPUTER CLUB


HAPCC News Magazine September 1998

The HAPCC general meeting is on 4th Sunday of each month. The next general meeting will be Sept 27th. Meeting time 7:00 - 9:00 pm. The HAPCC has a meeting place at: Maritime Museum of the Atlantic 1675 Lower Water Street , Halifax, NS.

Parking available in the nearby Government parking lot or in the Museum parking lot. Access to the building is via the Night Entrance Doors, located just to the right of the regular front doors. If door is locked, use the bell on upper left side of the Night Entrance Doors.

The meeting room is on the second floor and has a theatre type of layout. Washrooms are located close by. Elevator service is available. Coffee served.





Our first meeting this season September 27th, the featured guest is Charlie MacDonald. Charlie is visually challenged and is on the Chebucto net. He will talk to the group about his experiences in computing as a visually challenged person This should be an interesting meeting as it shows how all can enjoy the computing today.

IN THIS ISSUE:

Bill Marchant - Re associating a File Extension

Ken Fermoyle - Corel Offers Good Deal In Magic Gallery Bundle

General Information

A word of thanks to guest speakers and the their web suites

Newsletter Information

Meeting Schedule for the year



Re associating a File Extension

The other day, a friend and I were installing some new software on his computer. Quite unexpectedly, the installation program placed a copy of the Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) on his hard drive, and then associated the .JPG files with it. This would have been OK, except for the fact that we had been using the Photo Deluxe program for JPG files, and we wanted to continue using it.. But now the system did not want to use it any more. Double clicking on a JPG file meant that IE was now in charge.

The first thing we did to try to get around the problem was to uninstall the Internet Explorer. The intention was to then double click the JPG file, and get Windows "Open With" dialogue box to come up and then select the former program again and all would be well. The uninstall worked fine but it did not solve the problem because now, double clicking on JPG files caused the system to look for IE, and them claim that it couldn't find it. Windows wanted IE, and would settle for no other.

After a frantic hour or so, we decided to look in the QUE book 'Using The Windows 95 Registry'.

Here is what we found:

The book referred to above 'Using The windows 95 Registry' is big and not cheap and two thirds of it is technical stuff that most users will never refer to, but the other third is gold mine of information and when you need the information, I don't know of a better place to find it.

In this issue

Corel Offers Good Deal In Magic Gallery Bundle>

I have been a clipart collector and user since long before digital graphics came on the scene, for nearly 50 years, in fact. We clipped images from big binders full of pages supplied regularly for a fee by graphics services in those days. Today, you can buy huge collections of clipart on CD-ROM disks for not much more than the fee such a service charged for a month or two back then.

One CD collection comes from Corel: Gallery Magic 200,000, which actually includes a lot more than just clipart at least 105,000 piece of vector art, 80,000 professional photos, 15,000 Web images, 1,000 fonts, 200+ sound and 100+ video clips.

What really sweetens the deal are the utilities in the bundle: Bitstream Font Navigator, Corel Capture, Video for Windows and Windows Sound Finder, bitmap and vector graphic editors, plus slide show and album creation applets.

The result is a complete multimedia package with a treasure trove of resources, but also tools to help you manage them-all for a price of about $60. Considering that Bitstream Font Manager alone runs approximately $40, this means you get a whole bunch of useful graphics, sound and video bites for very little money! (Ed. Note: Font Navigator also comes bundled with Corel Draw 8 and Ventura 8.)

A word about Font Navigator: it is probably the best font management tool available today. That's the opinion of Rick Altman, honcho of the CorelWorld User Conferences for the past 10 years and all-around guru on graphics and publishing.

It isn't absolutely necessary to have Bitstream Font Navigator to use TrueType fonts successfully, but it sure makes life a lot easier. It lets you install, remove and find fonts. You can use it to create packs, or groups, of your favorite or specialized fonts, and view or print individual or group font information.

And it performs all these tasks with the greatest of ease. This is important because...

The number of fonts Win9X can configure is limited only by the amount of disk space available. Unbelievably, you can use and print approximately 1,000 fonts in any given document. (But please don't; that is 'way Too Much Of A Good Thing!) If you have anywhere near this number of fonts actually installed, however, they will take up valuable memory and slow your system's performance.

There's scenario that allows you to keep your installed fonts to a reasonable minimum, yet have as many as you want readily available when you need them. Font Navigator plays a major role in this scenario, spelled out at http://www.altman.com/august.htm. (This scenario is also included in one of my seminars, "Fonts: Managing the Mess," at the 1998 North America CorelWorld User Conference during October in San Diego.) Check out Altman's 'Fighting the Font Wars' article.

Now back to the clipart portion of the 200,000 Magic Gallery. It's good stuff. Often when you get a big collection of clipart and photos like this, the quality is spotty. Not so in this case. All the vector art I've tried to date has been crisp, sharp and generally well done. Third-party clipart licensed to Corel and included in this collection comes from solid, established graphics houses: 3G Graphics Inc., Archive Arts, Cartesia Software, Image Club Graphics Inc., One Mile Up Inc. and Techpool Studios Inc.

I haven't used the bit-mapped Web images as much, but it appears to be of consistently good quality also; the 1,000+ fonts, likewise.

All art and fonts are shown in an inch-and-a-quarter thick book, though admittedly in thumbnails so tiny I sometimes resorted to a magnifying glass to examine them. All the art and sound and video clips are catalogued by categories in an extensive Table of Contents.

Gallery Magic supports a big variety of graphics file formats, both vector and bit-mapped, including verity all of the most popular ones: CGM, EPS, WMF, GEM, WPG, CDR, DRW and PIC, to name a few vector formats. Bit-mapped formats include BMP, CPT, TIF, PCX, TGA, JPG, GIF and more.

The vector and bit-mapped image editors in the package are definitely lite versions, not to be confused with CorelDraw or Photo-Paint, but they're adequate for basic chores. The Gallery Magic wizard provides easy access to the clipart, photos, sound and video, while the album features offer an easy way to create, navigate and display albums from the Magic Gallery desktop.

All in all, this package is a good one, and an excellent value, in my opinion. The combination of a ton of very good clipart and the outstanding Font Navigator utility alone, never mind the extra added attractions, make it a bargain. It's bumped a few lesser clipart collections off my system.

Copyright 1998 by Ken Fermoyle, Fermoyle Publications.

Ken Fermoyle has written some 2,500 articles for publications ranging from Playboy, PC World and Popular Science to MacWeek and currently contributes to Microtimes. He was co host/producer of a radio show on computers and a partner in a DTP service bureau during the '80s. Ken's Korner articles are available free to User Group newsletters and Websites. For permission to reprint this article, contact kfermoyle@earthlink.net.

In this issue

General Information

Executive

Chairperson David Potter
Vice-Chair Bill Marchant
Treasurer Rob MacCara
Web Librarian Thayne MacLean
Newsletter Editor Diane Smith
Membership Promotion Pat Conen

and the following members who assist in planning our monthly meetings: Norman DeForest, Henry Hill, Ken Gilmour,and Colin Stuart.

A message from the Vice Chairman

The HAPCC has two kinds of meetings. Firstly the regular Sunday night meeting which most members attend regularly, secondly the monthly (approximately) planning meeting which organises the business of the Club, including what happens on the Sundays. The planning meeting is held on Monday, a week after the regular meeting in which all members of the Club are urged to attend. At the planning meeting, we discuss feature speakers for regular meetings, finances, membership, training, and other computer related subjects.

....Bill Marchant

In this issue

A word of thanks to guest speakers and the their web sites.

Our guest speaker at the March meeting was Mr. David Baxter, Product Specialist at MT&T for the MpoweredPc service. His multi-media presentation showed us how far the service has come, and in which direction it is heading. MpoweredPc was being officially launched on April 7, 1998 and it promises to be a serious contender in the high-speed internet/software on demand arena. More info can be found here: Mpowered. Once again, Thank you to MT&T and David Baxter.

Our guest speaker in February was Sgt. Bill Cowper, Internet Communications Officer of the Halifax Regional Municipality Police Department. He gave a history of how and when the police department started using the Internet. They were the first police department in Canada to be on the Internet. Sgt. Cowper is continually receiving calls from all over the world looking for assistance. The presentation showed how well the department and the officers in the patrol cars are versed on getting the criminals off the streets. If you would like to check-out their web site the address is Halifax Regional Police Service gives an idea of what an "Internet Cybercop" is all about.

In this issue

Newsletter Information

Newsletter Articles.... We are almost always in need of good articles. If anyone has something that they feel would make a good article, an interesting story to tell, or even a good meeting topic, please don't hesitate to pass it on. Articles can be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI Pro, MS Word, Windows Write, WordStar and of course WordPerfect.

The news letter is mailed to all paid up members and to anyone who has attended a meeting within the past three months. Yearly membership dues are $15.00.

Club Mailing Address -
P.O. Box 29008, Halifax N.S., B3L 4T8.

In this issue

Future meeting dates

We decide the meeting dates for the upcoming year at the last planning meeting of the season. The dates for these are listed below. As in previous years, the December meeting is moved to the early part of January due to Christmas Eve being near the fourth Sunday of the month.

The planning meetings are normally held on the second Monday (8 days) after the general meeting. They are currently held at a members home and the address is announced at the meeting prior to the planning meeting. Anyone is welcome to assist in the planning of future meetings or events. Meeting dates for the 1998/99 season:

Sept-27   Oct-25   Nov-22   Jan-3   Jan-31   Feb-28   Mar-28   Apr-25   May-24    June-27

Any changes to the scheduled dates will be announced where possible at the regular monthly meetings and/or in this newsletter.




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