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DENVER, CO – On August 9, 2011, Quark Inc., maker of QuarkXPress page layout software, has announced that the company has been acquired by Los Angeles-based private equity firm, Platinum Equity. This is huge news because QuarkXPress is a major software application for page layout, used by designers all over the world. QuarkXPress was one of the first major page layout applications to be used by professional designers since the late 1980s. At that time, there were only a few page layout... Read Full Story

SAN JOSE, CA – Adobe Systems Incorporated announced today the release date for its flagship product line – Creative Suite 5. The company sent out email notifications to its user base today and the release date for the official launch of CS5 has been set for April 12, 2010. Recently (on January 25, 2010), I received a notice from Adobe Systems reminding me that my upgrade window for CS4 would be closing soon. The notice did not say specifically when my upgrade window would close, so I called... Read Full Story

FREEFREEHAND.ORG – About 3 months ago, a new website was launched at www.freefreehand.org to try secure a future for the FreeHand application. Soon after Adobe Corporation bought out Macromedia, it appeared like FreeHand’s days were over when the software giant decided to stop further development of FreeHand in order to encourage users to switch to Illustrator. Currently Adobe still sells FreeHand, but without support for future operating systems it will be destined to work only on current... Read Full Story

The Rosetta library is required to be installed in Mac OS X for current versions of FontLab applications. By default, the Rosetta library is not enabled in Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) so you must install it from the OS 10.6 installer. The Rosetta Library The Rosetta library is included with Mac OS X. Its purpose is to allow Macintosh computers with Intel processors to be able to run applications written for PowerPCs. Rosetta is installed by default in Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 but not in... Read Full Story

In it’s continued support of its flagship graphics application, the Xara Group Ltd has just announced its latest release of Xara Xtreme version 5 on June 8, 2009. The new version has some long awaited improvements: New Object Gallery – The addition of a new Object Gallery provides better object level control. The Object Gallery functions much the same as the Layers palette in Adobe Illustrator, or the Object Manager in CorelDRAW. Users can find, select, lock or hide individual objects... Read Full Story

Welcome to the new Mike’s Sketchpad blog. We hope you like our new look. We’ve changed over from Blogger to Wordpress so we could offer some better features: Categories – Blogger was a little inadequate in this department. Wordpress has full support for categories and we are now able to take full advantage of them. Tags – Tags are very important in blogging. Sidebar Widgets – Designers will appreciate widget support in Wordpress. You can totally customize the look of your sidebars... Read Full Story

Since I wrote the “Porting Fonts Tutorials” section of the website, there has been a new font conversion utility from Morrison SoftDesign ( http://www.morrisonsoftdesign.com ) that has been released. FontXChange is available for the Macintosh only and is for OS 10.3 or higher. It will convert fonts from Macintosh format to Windows format and vise-versa. The single-user license sells for $99 (US). It can convert fonts to OpenType PostScript (single-file format), PostScript Type 1 (two-file... Read Full Story

Xara Xtreme is an all-in-one graphics application that is also a great value for only $89 USD. You can get it at the Xara.com website (http://www.xara.com/us/products/xtreme/). This graphics application has full vector drawing capability plus image editing all rolled into one. It has a large customer base and the gallery at the Xara website features several professional artists with some very impressive work (http://www.xara.com/gallery/). The Xara company is based in England. When you order... Read Full Story

The quickest and best free online font identification is to be found at WhatTheFont from MyFonts.com. (http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/). You simply upload an image file either from a url on the Internet or from a file on your local drive. The website will do character recognition on your image and separate the image into individual letters on a subsequent screen. Here you will have a chance to make corrections, such as replacing lower case letters with uppercase or vise-versa. On this... Read Full Story

I have received many emails re: raster to vector conversion. I have always used Adobe Streamline in the past, but Adobe has discontinued Streamline and replaced it with the new tracing tool in Illustrator starting with version CS2 and going forward. Fortunately, there is a free Open Source application called AutoTrace that is available (ref: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/ “AutoTrace – converts bitmap to vector graphics”). I have been following the development of AutoTrace for a couple of... Read Full Story