New to Scrolling with questions

[Paul S WI]

Greetings all;

Well, first of all I am fairly new to scrolling and this site, which I found about a week ago. This being my first week in retirement I have been, finally, able to spend an obscene amount of time in the shop. And more specifically in front of my Hegner. Tried puzzles and Fretwork so far. Hooked big time. Granddaughter loves the puzzles. Look forward to finishing my 'Fanasty Horse' Fret project. Still need to get mirrored plexiglass to call it complete.

Been reading this forum religously and gleening a lot of new ideas. Which brings me to ask these questions for the software gurus' out there.
1) Is there a way to convert .pdf files to tif,wmf, or whatever so that the file can be manipulated, resized, etc.?
2) I do have PSP7 and older version of CorelDraw. (It would be nice to scan items and be able to work with the drawing like you can with Vectors.) Got Andy's tutorial on PSP and will run through that today. Is there any difference or advantage to upgrading to PSP9?

SSW mag is my bible to scrolling. Have enough patterns to work with, but ideas I have gotten on this forum are leading me to try new things already. (Scanning, enlarging/reducing, creating new patterns, etc.)
So much to learn - better start slow.

p.s. To Blademan ( believe you're the one) - I took WMYoung's advice and ordered some Pegas' Puzzle blades. Will compare to the FD blades I have now. Like them, cut very well but do stray off course. OK once I got used to it.

Paul S.

[CanadianScroller]

There is some software that will open PDFs for manipulation, most of it is relatively expensive for a pauper like me.
If you get adobes acrobat7 you can do so much with pdfs.
You can always use the capture tool inside the Adobe reader. It is the camera icon.
Once you clip the picture to the clipboard, you can open your favorite paint program and make the changes.

There are other programs that will allow you to manipulate the graphics as vector images but like I said before they are out of my price range so I don't have any advice on them.

[Carter-Johnson]

Hi Paul.....

As you experiment with puzzle blades, let me put in my plug for cutting jigsaw puzzles freehand. There's no better time to tap into your creativity than when you first start scrolling, before you get locked in to doing everything with a pattern.

Questions? Feel free to email me as many others have at [email protected]

The important thing, though, is to have phun.....

Carter

[Gill]

Hi Paul

Welcome to the forum .

I have PSP 9 and understand that it's not very different from PSP 7. You should be able to produce satisfactory scrollsaw patterns using either version. However, since I've never used PSP 7, I'm not speaking from experience.

I also understand that CorelDraw is much more geared towards vector drawing than PSP.

Gill

[William Young (SE BC)]

Paul ;
You can get a ton of help with making new patterns here
http://groups.msn.com/absolutelyfreescrollsawpatterns
and here
http://groups.msn.com/FreeScrollsawPatterns

W.Y.

[Paul S WI]

Thanks for the info. Been practicing portrait design with PSP7. Using Andy's tutorial has really helped. Coming along, with a long way to go. Practice, practice, practice, is the key I guess. But persevere I will.
And Yes, Carter I will be looking to you for more information/advice as I do more puzzles. I completed one child's puzzle freehand. Large pieces and small puzzle. Simple enough. But the small, intricate, pieces will be quite the challenge I feel. Will let you know.

Paul S

[GrayBeard Phil]

Paul:

Just a few words about Corel Draw:

For home useage, I got the full version of CorelDraw Graphic Suite v12. Going from a scanned image to a vector graphic file is still time consuming. Lots of problems with the conversion engine. This is common even with Abobe Illustrator, which a few use at my day job. I hope you have better luck with the bit map-to-vector conversion engine.

Did you get the tablet pen input tool? I got one of the Wacom graphite tablets, but I just cannot get my fingers and hand to work with the delicate pen input device; a mouse or a track ball from kensington is more my speed. But as I watch a graphic artist use one of thoes Wacom tablets at my day job, (its all he uses, no mouse for his computer) it is truly impressive how fast he can create an illustration / graphic image.

If you have a very early version of CorelDraw, you can get an upgrade to the latest Suite still for a reasonable amount of money. The suite has a compititor to PSP9. But since PSP is now owned by Corel Corp, you might want to wait until the next release of CorelDraw Graphic Suite, which may contain PSP if Corel drops their own photo editor.

Don't forget to visit Rich Hutcheson's web site http://www.scrollsaws.com/ where Rick has a few tips on using corel draw, kind of mini movies. Good help, provided you are not using dial up internet connections.

Phil
(U of Wis-Madison class of Way-Back-When...)

[William Young (SE BC)]

Phil;
I would like to thank you for that info on Corel Draw in Rick Hutchesons's site. He has a wonderful big site there. A person could spend days in there and never see everything he has to offer. That one about making patterns is one that I had not been in yet. Unfortunately I am still on dial up but there are rumors that high speed might be in the works for my area. If and when it comes I will definitely download all those pages that Rick has to offer there.
W.Y.

[Blade Man]

Paul,

With most blades you have to feed off to one side a little bit, to cut straight ahead, but these will feed more straight ahead. It takes a little to adjust to that.