retplav asked:
Wanted..A program for creating simple paper covers (dustjackets) for books for
a school project.( for younger children)
Well, normally these are done in drawing programs, so Zoner Draw or Eve might
be good choices depending on the age of the children. (The commercial programs
used most often are Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand if you've access
to those)
These days some people do them in PhotoShop (which I mislike 'cause it leads to
fuzzy type and statements from designers like, ``I don't know how you'll get a
high resolution output from it to output to match that pre-flight profile''),
so you could use something like Ambient Design's ArtRage or Pixia, but it'll be
hard to get nice sharp output if the design calls for that.
A good compromise is to use a page layout program, so Ragtime Solo might be a
good choice for older kids.
Really though, it wasn't _that_ long ago that the traditional way to do a book
cover was to hire a calligrapher to do it, or have it handlettered by a
commercial artist. Rosemary Sassoon has a good book on working with kids and
letterforms including doing booklets, and any decent library will have books on
calligraphy. I list one free on-line text in my e-text list at
http://members.aol.com/willadams/books-free-type.html
Or one can just use a typesetting tool like TeX for this sort of thing.
Examples of its output at
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase or see my portfolio at
http://members.aol.com/willadams
William
