Part VI: The Part of Tens in Java

Creator PDF-417 2d barcode in Java Part VI: The Part of Tens

Paint Shop Pro Photo X3: This PC-only graphics editor is a good buy because it does nearly everything that Photoshop does and costs less than Photoshop Elements You ll need to shop around to find the lowest price, though (Corel charges $80 or $90 for this package) GIMP: If you re really on a shoestring budget, check out the free GNU Image Manipulation Program, better known as GIMP It s an open source package whose functionality rivals that of Photoshop without the expensive price tag GIMP supports a user-customizable interface, offers all kinds of sophisticated image and photo enhancements, and includes digital retouching, broad device support, and tons of graphics file formats It works with Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Sun OpenSolaris, and the FreeBSD operating systems, too Check it out at wwwgimporg and then download it!

If you work with photographs or other high-resolution, high-quality images or artwork, you may need one of these Web graphics tools

If it weren t so darned expensive, we d grant top honors to Photoshop CS5 Alas, $699 is too high for many novices budgets Wondering whether to upgrade from Photoshop Elements Adobe mentions these capabilities among its top reasons to upgrade: Improved file browser: Shows and tells you more about more kinds of graphics files and gives you more powerful search tools Shadow/Highlight correction: Powerful built-in tools add or manipulate shadows and highlights in images More powerful color controls: Color palettes and color-matching tools with detailed controls that Elements lacks Text on a path: Full-blown Photoshop lets you define any kind of path graphically and then instructs your text to follow that path This capability supports fancy layouts that Elements can t match If you need to use sophisticated visual effects, edits, or tweaks on highresolution photorealistic images, full-blown Photoshop is your best bet For basic Web sites, however, Photoshop is overkill it can do just about anything to photos or images of all kinds, which of course is why it s the most popular professional graphics editing tool

Like its little brother Photoshop Elements, full-blown Photoshop works with both Macintosh and PC operating systems The current version is Adobe Photoshop CS5 It s included in all of Adobe s product suites Photoshop CS5 add-ons and plugins provide specialized functions such as complex textures or special graphics effects This extensibility is nice because graphics professionals who need such capabilities can buy them (most cost $100 and up, with $300 a pretty typical price) and add them without muss or fuss But those who don t need them don t have to pay extra for the base-level software

Fireworks is a graphics program designed specifically for Web use, so it offers lots of nice features and functions for that purpose The current version is Adobe Fireworks CS5 Fireworks has one killer feature it lets you save portable network graphics (PNG) files with layers defined that work more or less the same way that Photoshop Document (PSD) files do Fireworks is tightly integrated with other Adobe products and therefore is of potentially great interest if you re using (or considering) Dreamweaver Simply put, this combination of Adobe products makes it very easy to add graphical spice to Web pages For more information about Fireworks and related Adobe products, check out wwwadobecom/products/fireworks

A broken link on your site can be embarrassing To spare your users the dreaded 404 Object Not Found error message, use a link checker to make sure your links are correctly formatted before and after you publish on the Web Many HTML editors and Web servers include built-in local link checkers, and they may even scour the Web to check external links Other Web sites may change or disappear after you publish your site Regularly check your site s links to make sure they still work The worst broken link is one that points to a page on your own site which is no longer there The W3C link-checking tool is free, easy to use, and works surprisingly quickly (thanks to HP, we guess, for the servers they donate to support the W3C) Here s how it works: You drop a URL in for a document you want to check, and the tool comes back to you with information about the links it