Cloanto Press Releases

Amiga Software Announcement

Udine, March 4, 1996

Personal Paint for Internet Publishing

As more and more organizations and individuals publish their work on the
World Wide Web, it is becoming more important to stand out with carefully
thought out Web pages. Graphics play an important part in this. Poorly
implemented pages annoy the users with images having wrong or missing
transparency information, lack of progressive display, and huge files
containing 256-color images where 16 colors could have achieved the same
results.

Cloanto's Personal Paint is an excellent tool for Internet publishing:
professional color reduction, quantization, dithering and antialiasing
algorithms yield excellent quality at resolutions, numbers of colors and
file sizes which yield optimal results on the Web.

Transparency and progressive display are fully supported by Personal Paint,
and so are new Web formats such as PNG. Cloanto and the Amiga have years of
experience where PC and Mac companies are just beginning to introduce
products.

Personal Paint 6.4 is included with the Amiga in the Internet Surfer pack.
The GIF module for Personal Paint is available from public domain sources.
Current Internet-related projects at Cloanto include new versions of
Personal Paint and a Cloanto Web site. More details on these will be
announced soon.

Public Domain GIF Module for Personal Paint

Cloanto has just released a new GIF I/O module ("personal_gif_io.library"
version 5.0) for Personal Paint, with includes support and documentation
for Internet features such as transparency and progressive display. The
archive has been placed in the public domain, and is available through
sources such as CompuServe and the Aminet. This material should be
especially useful for Internet developers (as it puts Personal Paint in
control of specific options of GIF89a), and users of the Amiga bundle packs
(in which Personal Paint is supplied without the GIF module).

On CompuServe: GO AMIGAUSER, Library 8, GIF_IO.LHA
On the Aminet: gfx/conv/gif_io.lha

DataTypes for the Amiga Surfer Pack

Cloanto has completed development of a set of high-quality Amiga DataTypes
for the GIF, JPEG, PNG and XBM formats, which are fast, system compliant,
and support unusual format variants. These DataTypes incorporate years of
experience acquired with Personal Paint. The DataTypes allow the Amiga
Surfer pack to process more than 99.5% of the pictures on the Web. This is
a higher average than comparable Mac and PC systems.

The new DataTypes are included with the Amiga in the Surfer pack.

Cloanto and CD-ROMs

With the Personal Suite CD-ROM, Cloanto was the first company launching an
Amiga CD-ROM product containing quality commercial (not freely available)
software at a popular price. Initially, this was felt as a particularly
risky task, given that in the Amiga community CD-ROMs are often perceived
as low-quality collections of existing, free distribution software. While
the Personal Suite in its metal box full of commercial software is now
becoming a collector's item, Cloanto is proud to release The Kara
Collection CD-ROM.

With the help of the Amiga community, new CD-ROM titles are being
developed. Products to be announced soon include Photo CD software.

New from Cloanto: The Kara Collection CD-ROM

This CD-ROM includes for the first time the complete collection of
ColorFonts, AnimFonts, Starfields and Plaquegrounds, plus a full set of
support tools by Kara Computer Graphics and Cloanto.

This is not a compilation of public domain material. Kara fonts are used by
the finest professionals on different computing platforms. They are great
for pictures, animations, titling effects and presentations. The CD-ROM
contains 80 Amiga ColorFonts (with effects like Brick, Glass, Chrome,
Chisel, etc.), plus hundreds of alternate color palettes. All ColorFonts
are also supplied in different formats used by video titling packages. The
CD-ROM includes the new Cloanto ColorType software, which allows the user
to apply changes to the ColorFonts (also automatically via ARexx). The
Cloanto Personal Fonts Maker package and additional printer-downloadable
fonts in black & white are also included.

AnimFonts use animated brushes to render effects like handwriting, rotating
characters, fuse-like sparkles, etc. The fonts can be used to create
animations with any Amiga package supporting Anim-Brushes. The CD-ROM
contains a software upgrade with Anim-Brush extensions for users of
Personal Paint, plus ARexx scripts to automate the rendering process. As
Kara says, "So long to the laborious task of placing individual letters...
This is the way AnimFonts were meant to be!!!"

The set of Starfields animations includes moving stars seen from different
perspectives, plus animated space objects. The collection of Plaquegrounds
contains textures and backgrounds (e.g. granite, marble, sand-stone, wood,
etc.) stored in different syles and sizes (as 24-bit images and in other
popular formats). Starfields and Plaquegrounds can be used alone, or as a
background for the ColorFonts and AnimFonts.

Cloanto has a tradition of quality packages at an affordable price.  This
CD-ROM contains ten years of artwork by Kara Computer Graphics, at a
fraction of the price of the original, separate packages.  Most of the
material in The Kara Collection is being brought to the public for the
first time, exclusively on this CD-ROM.

For more information send E-mail to <info@cloanto.it>.
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.                                                               .
.    Cloanto Italia srl               Tel +39 432 545902        .
.    Via G. B. Bison 24               Fax +39 432 609051        .
.    33100 Udine                      E-mail info@cloanto.it    .
.    Italy                            CompuServe 100145.15      .
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