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Adobe Photoshop will undoubtedly be featured many times in this column, so I figured I’d start now. I wanted to share a few things about one of Photoshop 4.0’s new features: Guides and Grids. Since I’ve been playing with them, I’ve discovered a couple of cool tricks. The first concerns the preferences setting for Grids (File > Preferences > Guides & Grid). The default setting for Gridline is 1, with the unit of measure set to inches, and the default for Subdivisions is 4. With these two settings, a major gridline will be shown every inch with a subdivision line every 1/4 inch. These settings can be used and changed as needed, but I wanted to set the values to something I can use all the time. By changing the Subdivisions to 8, the lines are placed at 1/8-inch increments, which just so happens to be the printer’s standard for bleeds (the area of color trimmed off after printing). So if you set the Subdivisions to 8, the grid will show a 1/8-inch bleed line around your entire image. Now you can quickly determine which portion of your image is going to bleed by turning on the grid lines (Mac: Cmd-Apostrophy, Windows: Ctrl-Apostraphy). FIG 1 The default setting for Subdivisions is 4. Change it to 8 to show grid lines every 1/8 inch.   FIG 2 The red lines are grid lines, and the blue lines are guide lines that were placed based on the grid lines. Since the grid lines are in 1/8-inch increments, it becomes much easier to see an image’s trim area. The second cool trick relates to Guide lines. Photoshop guide lines are similar to those found in other programs. You can drag them from the horizontal and vertical rulers, and you can snap the edges of objects to guides for precision placement. But guides in Photoshop do something guides in other programs do not. They allow you to align the exact center of an object to a guide. In other words, you can snap an object’s center point simply by moving the center of the object close to the guide line. For example, if you have an object that is 300 pixels wide, 150 pixels will fall to the left of the guide line, and 150 pixels to the right. This works for both horizontal and vertical guides. NOTE: For this to work you must have Snap To Guides turned on in the View menu. I had a project that required multiple ovals to be aligned to one another both vertically and horizontally. By using this technique I found it very easy to align all the ovals quickly and accurately. Give it a try. On certain projects it may save you a lot of time. FIG 3 As you move an object’s center point to a guide line, the object’s center snaps to the lines in the same way its outer edge would.

Tex-Edit & Tex-Edit Plus Download Tex-Edit Plus Here

Tex-Edit Plus is probably the best word processor you can get for the Macintosh. Forget the fact that it takes mere seconds to open from the desktop and runs very fast. Forget the fact that it runs in an incredibly small amount of RAM (I run it at its default setting of 1MB). Forget the fact that it does all the everyday things you need to do with a word processor. Just the fact that it’s only 10 bucks should convince you to pay the shareware fee. One of the great features of the program is the Modify dialog box. Within this box, you’re able to perform several transformations to your type. For you Mac users, how many times have you received a text file from your PC neighbor that had hard returns after every line. In Tex-Edit Plus’ Modify dialog box, you can set it to strip out all “CRs,” or carriage returns, that cause those hard returns. And it does it faster than it takes you to curse out the PC user who sent it to you. You can also change straight quotes to curly quotes, hyphens to dashes, substitute ligatures and a truck-load of other useful items. The program has all the features you’ll need to create and edit word processor files...and then some! Get it, pay for it, use it. Tex-Edit is a stripped-down version of Tex-Edit Plus that like SimpleText and TeachText can only handle files less than 32K in size. It’s distributed via shareware for $5.

Download Super NoteTab Here

If anyone knows of a Windows text-editor that performs the same functions, please let us know about it. Sean currently uses a freeware editor for Windows called Super NoteTab, which is also very fast, easy on RAM, and has a cool interface, but its typographical features are nowhere near as advanced as Tex-Edit Plus.