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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: swilcox on Jan 11, '03 05:52:58PM

" But what is a nuisance is the frames for photos in the masters don't actually seem to bear any relationship to the photos you import. It's almost as if the embossed frame in the Letterpress theme, for example, was just a few pixels on the background graphic rather than some feature I could snap a photo to, or resize to fit a photo, or something."

I think you're not seeing the fact that these photo frames are alpha channel cutouts. The manual explains: drop a photo onto the slide canvase and then send it to the back. The photo frame on the master will act as a mask. You can then resize, move, rotate, set transparency, etc your picture inside the frame.

In fact, I played around a bit in Photoshop today and created my own images with alpha channel cutouts. You can then easily import (save them as TIFFs in PS and use Edit->place in Keynote) them into Keynote to create your own master slide backgrounds. This is very powerful stuff. Apple absolutely got this part right.



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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: Mitchell on Jan 11, '03 07:29:14PM
Yes, I see you're right about that. RTFM, Mitchell.

Any insight about the other two things?

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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: swilcox on Jan 11, '03 10:27:58PM

"RTFM, Mitchell. Any insight about the other two things?"

Ha! I groused about the thin manual when I opened the box, but it's actually pretty good. I see someone else addressed the font issue. I don't know about the chart problems. I rarely use charts. I do use tables a lot though, and the tools that are available there seem pretty good for a v.1.0 product.




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I found Keynote disappointing in many ways
Authored by: Mitchell on Jan 12, '03 12:42:30AM
There is a subtlety to making your own alpha channel masks, though. If you look in the Keynote inspector carefully, some masters have "Image fill" and others have "color fill", with the image placed the way you did it, with Edit --> Place --> Choose...

If you open the Keynote Package, and find your way to Contents --> Resources --> English.lproj --> Themes there are theme files, themselves packages, that you can open. These contain the tiffs which you can use to create your own masks for other photo layouts. Nice to have a consistent starting point.

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