No one can accuse Canvas of lying dormant. If the folks at Deneba see a feature that’s available in another program, they incorporate it into Canvas. As a result. Canvas looks great on any features-comparison list. Quite honestly, it offers two to three times as many features as competing programs, including Adobe Illustrator and Aldus FreeHand. Some of the features are useful, some aren’t, but they multiply like rabbits.
Canvas 3.5 is beefier and bulkier than ever. Having nearly run out of capabilities used in other Mac programs. Canvas 3.5 takes many of its new functions from an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink program on the Windows platform, called CorelDraw. The Envelope command, for example, allows you to distort selected objects as if they were reflected in a funhouse mirror. As you edit the rectangular boundary — known as the envelope — of a selection, the objects bend and bulge to keep up. By applying envelopes to text blocks, you can create special character effects previously available in Adobe Type Align and Letraset LetraStudio.
Less successful is the extrude function (also found in CorelDraw); it assigns depth to a 2-D shape by extending its sides into the third dimension. Unfortunately, Canvas offers orthogonal extrusion only; there’s no way to make the 3-D effect appear in perspective. And the only way to alter an extrusion is to remove the effect and reapply the Extrude command.
One of the few capabilities of Illustrator and FreeHand that Canvas lacked was compound paths, which let you use one path to cut a hole in another. For example, if you use a small circle to cut a hole in a larger circle, you have a doughnut. Canvas 3.5 now offers this feature in the form of the Group Composite command. After you apply the command to two or more selected objects, all portions of the objects that overlap become transparent, enabling you to see background elements. You can even edit the points and Bezier control-handles of a compound path without ungrouping it.
Version 3.5 now offers small-document design capabilities. As in a desktop publishing package, you can pour text from one column into another. Canvas models its text-overflow tab like the one in PageMaker (but it works in a different way). To automate formatting attributes. Canvas offers style sheets. You can apply a style to a single word or to an entire paragraph. From then on, you simply edit the style to change all affected text.
Canvas has always had problems, but version 3.5 has outright bugs. For example, create a text block, then bind it to a path to create text on a curve. If you don’t like the way the type fits, you reshape the path and refit the text. Upon reapplying the Bind Text command to the text. Canvas flings the letters across the path, knocking them on their sides. Happens every time. As a workaround, you can remove the effect and rebind the text, but a bug is still a bug.
And that’s not all. When you clone points, you can no longer access their control handles. When you remove an effect created with an Envelope or Extrude command, you can’t undo the removal. When you extrude a text block. Canvas unaccountably switches the fill and outline colors. If the text block was first distorted with the Envelope command, the outlines disappear entirely.
Deneba programmers must look at competing packages, and someone says, “You know, we can have this feature up and running in a week.” One week later, there it is, tucked into the most unlikely corner of the interface. I, for one, would like fewer bells and whistles, sturdier core functions that I can rely on (like the improved pen tool), and an interface that I can navigate without scrambling for the manual. I hope that in the future someone at Deneba will say, “Let’s not add that feature until we get it exactly right and figure out how in the world it will benefit our users.” Wouldn’t that be something?
McClelland, Deke. (January 1994). Canvas 3.5. Macworld. (pgs. 49-50).
Deneba Systems
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13 / 
2014-04-14 / 
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pantone_pro_toolkit.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
