| PaintShop Photo Pro X3 for Photographers · · · As well as the Text tool, PaintShop Photo Pro has a range of tools for creating geometric and irregular shapes. You'll learn how to use all of these, including the all-powerful Pen tool which can be used to draw any shape that you can imagine. As well as creating text, this chapter shows you how you can manipulate it. You can apply any of the filter effects to text providing you first convert it to a Raster layer. PaintShop Photo Pro X3's new Layer Effects have no such limitations and you'll find out how to use these to good effect to produce striking and impactful typography. You'll also discover how to make text follow any path ­ around a circle or along a wavy line, for example ­ and how to distort letter shapes to create your own type forms. At the end of the chapter you'll find two step-by-step projects that show you how to make a greetings card and use text selections to create special type effects. In this chapter we take a look at PaintShop Photo Pro's text and vector drawing tools. These features expand PaintShop Photo Pro's capabilities and broaden its use beyond photo editing into the realms of illustration and graphics. In practical terms this means that as well as editing photos you can create illustrations from scratch and produce a range of photo-based projects like greetings cards, invitations, calendars, flyers, and even brochures. How Text and Vectors Work Up to now nearly everything we've done in PaintShop Photo Pro has involved manipulating pixels. Text and vector objects work in a different way to pixel- based images and this provides them with some advantages. Whereas a pixel-based bitmap is composed of many individual dots, each described in terms of its red, green, and blue component values, vector objects and text are mathematically defined shapes. The object's properties are defined and from these the computer constructs them. A circle, for example, might be described in terms of its radius, stroke weight and color, and fill. The user isn't necessarily aware of this and just uses the available Shape tools and the Materials palette to draw the required shape, or the Text tool to enter type. Vectors have two distinct advantages over bitmaps. Because they need minimal data to describe them, they take up very little memory and disk space. And because they are generated by the computer they are resolution independent, which is another way of saying you can make them as big as you like with no loss in quality. Vectors also have their limitations. They're a good way of producing regular shapes like letterforms, geometric shapes, and even irregular curvy shapes, but they're not great at representing real-world textured, detailed scenes, which is why we need the pixels for photographic images. For this reason vectors tend to be confined to type and 2D illustration with flat color or mathematically predictable gradations. 184