Strokes, incidentally, are organized in their own palette, which can display all existing strokes or just list strokes by category (folder). Strokes can be defined and added to the palette with a simple menu selection.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] You have an equal amount of control over text, even before converting it to paths. You can stroke it with bitmaps and even adjust joints, widths, slant and any other stroke or fill aspect.



Another major, major feature of Expression 2 is its ability to trace bitmap images, just like Adobe Streamline. However, with Streamline, you need a separate application to be able to do any serious image manipulation. With Expression 2, it's all built into one package.



The bitmap tracing functionality is pretty straightforward. It allows you to assign a level of colors for the interpolation, smooth the bitmap before processing and adjust how tightly or loosely the trace will conform to the original. While you can set any number of colors in the conversion dialog box, I found that the program really maxes out at 256, which is probably a good thing because anything higher would result in an unusable number of paths. On the negative side though, adjusting an image from 8 bits per pixel down to 8 bits total does result in fidelity loss.



If you want an exact tracing of your original bitmap image, you're not going to get it in Expression 2. But you will get some nice tracings that have a bit of an artistic touch to them.

Other significant features in Expression 2 include:

• Warp, which using a grid to warp bitmap and vector data. You can import bitmaps into the program, place a grid over them and then stretch coordinates for warps within and without the objects' bounding boxes.
• Onion skin, for showing previous and next documents for cell animation.
• Support for Photoshop filters (on bitmap objects).
• Paper textures for strokes and fills, whose resolution can be controlled independently.
• Soft edges and embossed fills.
• Masks with strokes and fills.

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