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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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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 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
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.
