2007 May | Perspector Insider

Archive for May, 2007

Perspector 3.1.1: PNG pictures in 3D

By Tim Hards | May 18, 2007

We have just released Perspector 3.1.1. This minor update now allows PNG pictures to be inserted!

Also if any inserted picture has transparent areas, these are kept (unfortunately this doesn’t work with PowerPoint 2000 - those areas still go black).

Here you can see a clip art PNG picture used with the Free-Floating layout that is available with Professional Edition. Because the placeholders for the picture are already positioned, this image took 1 minute to create. Without layouts it is still possible to create the image, but it will take a little longer because the pictures have to be manually placed.

Time to create: 1 minute.

Tags: 3D, PowerPoint, PNG, clipart, clip art

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Content placeholders

By Tim Hards | May 6, 2007

The Professional Edition of Perspector has an item called a slide placeholder. These can be inserted by inserting a layout from the Perspector panel or from the Slides > Insert Layout menu.

Before Perspector 3.1, slide placeholders could be clicked to insert an image of a PowerPoint slide from the current presentation, or to insert a group of Perspector shapes that represent the selected slide. Here you can see three slide placeholders from Perspector 3.0, one placeholder contains a slide image, the other two are empty:

In Perspector 3.1 these placeholders have been extended to become general content placeholders that can contain either slides or pictures. Here is an example from Perspector 3.1 with an arbitrary picture in one of the placeholders, and a slide image in another:

This new functionality in the Perspector layouts allows a whole new set of images to be created easily, using the current set of built-in placeholder layouts. For example, here I used the Left-To-Right Strip layout to line up photos of a few of my colleagues (photos taken from http://www.perspector.com/aboutus.cfm) - this took seconds to create:

Tags: 3D, PowerPoint, PowerPoint slides

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Automatic Perspector image size

By Tim Hards | May 6, 2007

It used to be the case that the size and position of the Perspector Frame edit window determined the size and position of the image that was generated on the slide when the OK or Draft button was clicked. While editing an image, the window could be resized and dragged around the slide like a regular Windows window. This was needed if you wanted to make more room in the frame to draw some more 3D shapes. This has changed in Perspector 3.1.

Now the edit window is fixed and covers the whole PowerPoint slide. The size and position of the window now has nothing to do with the size and position of the generated images. Instead Perspector automatically sizes the generated image to fit the shapes in the image.

This change was made to make it easier to draw new images. The window size/position is one less thing to worry about when creating an image.

But what if you prefer the old way of working? What if you want the fine control over resizing the window? Perhaps you like to create fancy effects where the frame window cuts the edge of the shapes in the frame (let me know if you do anything like this - I’d be very interested to hear!). Well, the good news for you is that you can still do this. Here’s how:

To use manual window sizing and positioning, toggle Frame > Allow Manual Size and Position. You have to do this for each frame you want to do this for. If you want this setting to be the default for all new frames, toggle Tools > Options > Allow manual sizing and positioning for new frames.

Tags: 3D, PowerPoint

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The slide beneath the Perspector window

By Tim Hards | May 6, 2007

When editing images with Perspector, the edit window used to obscure the PowerPoint slide behind it:

Perspector 3.1 now lets you see the slide beneath the shapes:

This is something that users asked for. As you can see it makes it easier to see how the 3D shapes fit in with the rest of the items on the slide.

Originally, when we implemented this for 3.1 we went with a totally clear transparency effect. Initially this looked good but we quickly realised that it was confusing because you couldn’t immediately tell what was in the Perspector frame (i.e. the shapes you were editing) and what was behind it (the other items on the slide). As you can see in the example above, the solution we settled on was to simply darken the transparency effect so that the shapes being edited clearly stand out from the rest of the slide.

You can change the level of the background transparency to suit you. Tools > Options > Window background gives you the choice of different levels of transparency, including a solid editing background (the only choice in the earlier versions of Perspector):