Paint Shop Pro Version 9

[Holly Mosser]

I would like to create scroll saw patterns and have purchased PSP9 and now I am wondering if I have made a costly mistake. Is this program that hard to learn that I am going to have to go to classes, which are not available where I live. I have not installed it yet and would like to get some expert advice on the PSP9 before I take the plunge.

[Gill]

Hi Holly

Have you tried Andy Deane's excellent PSP tutorial here? There's also a good (free) online PSP course here which will give you more of an insight into how to get the best out of the software.

Gill

[Old Mooner]

I bought the v.9 from Amazon and tried Andy Deane's tutorial. It is very good (the tutorial I mean). Do you know the easiet way to get a "hard copy" of the tutorial? Flipping back and forth between the program and the tutorial is a drag.
Moon

[Gill]

Hi Moon

If you have a look at this link, you'll find a list of several forums (or should that be 'fora'? I'm sure there's an answer somewhere in Pedants' Corner ) that Andy belongs to. Perhaps if you ask him on one of those, he might be able to help you out.

Alternatively, you can download Open Office for free (!) and simply cut & paste each individual page into the writer module. Then it can be saved as a PDF file. Open Office is very useful for creating your own PDFs and I recommend it strongly; it's also a much smaller program than MS Office yet it compares quite favorably.

Once you have the PDF file, it's a simple matter of printing it. However, if you've got the space on your monitor, there's no reason why you can't have both Acrobat and PSP9 operating simultaneously.

Gill

[Old Mooner]

Thanks Gill--
I'll give "Open Office" a try. 'Preciate your help.
Moon

For anybody who's interested in psp but doesn't want to spend the money, the GIMP is somewhat comparable and available at

http://www.gimp.org/

for free. There are also free tutorials for it.

[PiALaModem]

I've tried the GIMP and it looks good, but it won't load any files bigger than a triviality. There was, I recall, a query in the setup that asked about some amount of memory to use and I accepted the default. That may be it. If someone knows how to raise this number after installation is done, it'd save me some PITA messing around. I have Photoshop Elements, which works for everything I need to do, so there's little motivation to start messing with it. I'd like to give it a fair try, though.

I'd like to help you, but afraid I can't as I use the Linux version which doesn't ask that question.

Just looked at Groking the Gimp documentation on line .... at pretty much the beginning it shows how to set the amount of memory used and explains how to estimate how much you will need. Says the default is 10 Megs.

[PiALaModem]

That's the problem with GNU people. They use the word "grok" as if it were a word. Even when I was a geek I wasn't that kind of a geek or to that extent. Thanks for the tip, I'll follow it up.

[Old Mooner]

Looks like v.9 will be great for patternmaking. Gill, I figured out how to print out the tutorial without downloading a bunch of new programs. When you get to the first page of the tutorial, click on "File", then "Edit with Microsoft Word" (of course that assumes you have "Word" on your computer). That page (page 1) then appears as a document in "Word". Print the page. You do that for each page of the tutorial. The only problem is that the illustrations of Andy's face don't come out too well, but they really aren't needed to run the tutorial. Thanks for the help. By the way--"Open Office" looks like a good program, especially since it is free.
Moon