Corel Print House Magic: Now you can be a pro

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): If you've been using one of those Print Shop programs from Broderbund, you'll know how easy it can be to produce great-looking invitation cards, flyers, banners and other things right on your own PC.

Combine it with one of those excellent color printers from HP, Canon and Epson, and you'll be able to astound your friends and relatives with fairly professional quality printouts.

Corel Corp. of Ottawa, Canada, one of the few top leaders in graphics programs, has been creating all sorts of graphics programs for the PC, and lately also for the Mac. As you should know, CorelDRAW is their flag carrier.

Although over the years this program has become much easier to use, CorelDRAW is far more suitable for serious jobs. The tools and the features are far too numerous and too complex for casual PC users to really comprehend and master.

For the home and small businesses, Corel will have a more digestible offering that will stand head and shoulders against Broderbund's Print Shop. The program, Print House Magic, is currently still in its Beta testing stage. It is actually the third major release of Corel Print House in three years. Courtesy of Corel Corp., I had the honor of being one of its Beta testers.

The Beta 1 version of Corel Print House Magic comes in two CDs, the second of which is packed with collection of photo images. According to Corel, Print House uses the components taken from CorelDRAW, but the user interface has been designed specifically to make the program very intuitive.

And given the fact that it has been intended for use at home or by small business owners who want to create attractive documents on their own, the program has to be very easy to use. The good news is that right from the moment I loaded the program, it was clear that Corel had done a good job in this respect.

Print House Magic is actually a graphics suite that comprises three programs -- Print House 3, Photo House 2 and Family & Friends. Print House is where we place objects like a scanned photograph or a piece of clipart on the page; it's more like a page-layout program. Photo House is an image editing program based on CorelPHOTO-PAINT components. It lets us add special effects -- 25 of them -- to our photos, reduce dust and scratches, etc. Family & Friends is more like a very simple personal information manager (PIM); it has an address book, a calendar and a utility for creating various kinds of lists.

The strength of the suite is perhaps its collection of samples, 2000 altogether. We can use any one of them, make a few modifications here and there as necessary and print it out.

Similar to what you'd have in WordPerfect if you turned on its PerfectExpert, there is a panel for the tools and the wizard on the left side of the screen, while the page that you're working on remains visible on the right side. All modifications that we make will immediately be applied to the page or object on the right, and this dynamic preview eliminates guesswork.

Literary talents

Unlike many other programs that emphasize only their ease of use, Print House Magic has also been enriched with some literary talents, as well. When you want to send a card to a friend who has just lost his job, for example, you may have difficulty finding the right words. To help you in such a situation, Print House offers a collection of poems and sayings that you can simply drag drop into the card to convey your feelings. You'll find messages such as "When life gets you down and nothing seems to go your way, remember that you always have a friend: Chocolate!"

Also new in this suite is the collection of humorous caricatures and colophons. They are parts of the clipart collection, and they all can be used to add spice to our greeting cards. Other features found in Print House are borders, backdrops and stock photos. We can create our own collection of preferred cliparts and images, and we save them in the Scrapbook.

The Help module is still very much undeveloped as this program is still in its early development stage. I got a little curious when I clicked on the Help menu item and saw Folding Demonstrations. I clicked on that and clicked on the first item on the list that appeared. It said: "To fold a half-fold card, fold the paper in half." That doesn't say much, does it?

But when I clicked on the second item, I got a glimpse of what the Help would be. A video clip was playing and it showed me how I should fold a quarter-fold card. While it was not a terribly complicated thing to do, the use of video to provide instructions is something that we do expect to see more in the future. I was testing Print House Magic on a PC that had no audio capability, so there was no sound as the video played. The video playback was smooth enough, although the machine ran on an aging Pentium 90 MHz processor.

Family & Friends is a good complement to the other two programs. We can create invitations by merging the list from this program -- and others, too -- with the cards and envelopes that we have created in Print House 3.

What should be

The Back, Cancel and Next buttons are located at the bottom of each panel. I think it would be better if they were placed on top, so that we don't really have to jump up and down a lot, which can be rather annoying if working with a 20" monitor at 1024 by 768 resolution.

Another thing that I hope Corel won't forget to add is the more realistic-looking drop shadow. In this Beta 1 version, I can apply a number of preset shadows to the objects we have on the page, but they are too unrealistic.

The Property Bar, which has become common in the majority of Corel programs, is also present in Print House 3. It still has to be worked on. At the moment, for instance, I cannot change the paper orientation from portrait to landscape just by clicking buttons as I could in CorelDRAW.

All in all, however, it seems that the suite will provide decent tools for the home and the small office. They are also fun to use and they are intuitive, too. The wizards will have even dummies up and running in no time. With Print House Magic, we will no longer have to go out and buy expensive greeting cards, invitation cards, signs, banners, stationery and even business cards.