Artstream springs from an electronic publishing legacy dating back to
1978. Following years of experience in Fortune 500 environments by its
principals, Mediascape was founded in 1992 to provide the state of the
art in Unix based electronic publishing solutions.
Artstream 1.0 was first exhibited in October of 1993, and introduced a
vast array of functionality including its revolutionary Vector
Paint® technology. Artstream 2.0 has since been redesigned to
take advantage of the improved C++/OpenGL architecture of advanced
graphics workstations, and accomodate emerging GUI conventions. It now
addresses more than ever the demands of high quality graphic art,
including the varied disciplines of Illustration, Image
compositing, Typography and Page assembly for print and Web. In
Artstream 2.0 these functions are provided at an unprecedented level of
integration, along with unique features that harness the benefits of
OpenGL® accelerated hardware.
Illustration
The basic features that have become staples of popular Illustration
software such as Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand, and Corel Draw
are all included:
Unlimited layering with lock, hide and reorder options.
Object and vertex selection tools.
Object shape editing (reshape, move, rotate, scale, mirror and skew).
Filled and/or stroked paths with assignable line weight, and cap styles.
Compound paths.
Object cut, copy and paste.
Attribute copy and paste.
Vector pan and zoom, with continuous border rulers.
Gradient length and direction tool.
Extensive color mixing and selection features.
Tool dialogs for numerical entries.
Axis locked dragging and point snapping.
Completed figure continuation.
Keyboard acceleration and modifier keys.
Artstream extends this functionality with important features that work
separately and together to enable otherwise difficult or nearly
impossible effects.
Object based, uniform or variable transparency.
Stroke fade controls, allowing airbrush blends to a given transparency
from a given radius in either direction from the center to the edge.
Multi-attribute paths, allowing independently variable color and
transparency for fills and strokes, and variable width and fade for
strokes.
Selectable stroke side rendering, allowing "friskets" and
other color dispersion effects.
Vector Paint®, allowing brushes
designed with any geometry and combination of attributes to be deformed
along any path, also allowing variable attributes within the path. This
capability allows numerous benefits including varied reuse of complex
patterns and simulation of natural media.
Shade Guides®, allowing dynamically adjustable,
multi-color, multi-transparency, gradients to blend along an arbitrary
path, as opposed to linear, radial or other fixed geometry paths.
DynaLensesTM, allowing dynamically adjustable plugins,
(PhotoShop, Premier and Illustrator style), to be applied to the
interior of any filled shape.
Built-in vector filters including precision offset path generation with
optional self-intersection trimming.
Prior point adjustability on a shape in progress.
Pick-through for selection for occluded objects.
Support of raster or vector textures in fills and/or strokes.
Image Compositing
Import of raster images in many formats including: TIFF, SGI, JPEG,
GIF, PNG, PPM, YUV, Alias, SOFTIMAGE, and FIT, with support of various
color spaces and associated alpha channel.
Cropping of images along Bezier vector boundaries allowing arbitrary
shape fitting, including vector cutouts.
Vignettes of images within arbitrary vector shapes, and variable width
image "feathering" along any image edge.
Image shape editing (reshape, move, rotate, scale, mirror and skew).
Image transformation inside a shape (move, rotate and scale), including
optional repeating.
Uniform or variable image transparency and color tinting.
In-line launch of selectable raster editor, (defaults to imgworks).
Typography
Support of any Type1 or CID style typeface.
Per character support of style override.
Font size selection with horizontal or vertical condensation.
Character kerning and tracking.
Character rotation.
Baseline offset.
Body lead control with additional settings before and after paragraphs.
Per character color, transparency and texture.
Paragraph based text alignment including left, center, right and
justified.
Support of character placement with fractional point accuracy.
Instant entry text cursor enabling text block editing upon placement.
Page Assembly
Multi-Document Interface, with multiple views of each document.
Multi-page layout for up to 1000 pages.
Multiple page viewing.
Insertion and deletion of pages at any document position.
Reordering of pages to any document location.
Document navigator with full, collapsible view of all elements in all
active documents.
Drag and drop reorder or transfer of any page element between
documents, pages and layers.
Page view switching by scrolling, jumping to first, last, previous,
next, or by number or navigator icon.
Import of editable Artscript, PostScript® and EPS clipart.
Import and manipulation of 3D Inventor models.
Paragraph based, user definable styles for all text attributes.
Simple text block creation tool.
Text fitting into arbitrary shapes, including runarounds in compound
shapes.
Assignment of any fill and/or stroke paint attributes to a text block.
Support of text insets for text blocks of any shape.
Text along a path.
Named story lines with support for multiple story flows.
Text block shape editing (reshape, move, rotate, scale, mirror and
skew).
Numerous output formats, with optional anti-aliasing.
Unlimited resolution for rendered output.
Artstream's interface is carefully engineered for simplicity, power and
consistency with popular desktop publishing conventions. X Windows
ICCCM protocols are supported, enabling such functions as "primary
copy" allowing any text to be selected from the desktop, or other
compliant apps, and pasted into place.
Silicon Graphics Edition
Artstream for Silicon Graphics is fully integrated with the Indigo Magic (IM)
desktop, allowing applicable icons to be dragged from the desktop, or other
compliant apps, and dropped directly into a page position or palette. Additionally,
this version is fully maintainable by the Software and License Managers
provided by the IM toolchest.
