Images are big and often filled with redundant information. Once you compress them, you need to decompress them and see them. Viewers are the unsung heroes of compression. They let you see it all - without making you deal with the actual compression/decom
Look! There in your computer. It's an unknown application. It's an odd file format. It's, it's a viewer?! Since imaging hit the desktop, viewers have become super heroes with X-ray vision. They see through foreign file formats and boost your strength to access documents.
How many times have you gotten a diskette or CD in the mail with an unreadable file? For me, the number is too high to count and the frustration too flabbergasting to forget. That all changed when I became acquainted with a computerized super-hero: A viewer. It's truly a computerized Clark Kent, complete with a humble exterior and X-ray vision.
What is a viewer, really? Is it a utility? An application? It can be either, depending on its size and what it can do. Some viewers are as small as 80 KB, while others can be as large as 15 MB. They let you do lots of things and are quickly becoming an effective tool for business communication. Especially in imaging.
Think about it. Images originate from scanners, faxes, e-mail/Internet or shared files. Once you have an image, you need to read it. That's where "viewing" tools come in. You might need to see a document created by an application you don't have. It could be anything. A photo of a damaged car for an insurance claim. An E-size engineering drawing. A spreadsheet. A text document. An HTML file.
Depending on the viewer, you should be able to "view" any document regardless of its origination. In theory, you can view something in your PC that was created in a totally different operating system like Mac, Unix, CAD. For some products, it's true. These tend to be called "universal viewers." Don't believe it's a true universal viewer just because the box says so. Get a list of environments and file formats the viewer supports and make sure it supports all of yours.
Almost all viewers come with standard features like zoom and multipage viewing. These let you enhance images and see more than one page of a file. Multipage is tricky. Make sure you can view more than one page at a time in one open window. You don't want to open multiple windows to view multiple pages of a document at the same time. Don't confuse this with thumbnails, which are low-resolution images of what's inside the bigger file.
Now that you've seen the image, you might want to add something to it. How do you do that? Annotations. These are basic tools found in any viewer that include highlighting, creating boxes, drawing arrows, and in most cases sticky notes (notes you can attach to an image). Some let you put stamps on documents. Others do redacting (blocking out information on a document).
None of these things alter the original document. They float on top of an image and get saved as a separate file that accompanies the original file.
Exposing the View
Viewers are becoming more and more popular and complex. As a result, businesses are realizing their effectiveness in informed decision making. It eliminates constantly having to pass paper around manually -- adding changes, deleting others. You do that quicker with a viewer and speed up a decision making process. People want their viewers to do more and to do it quickly and easily. Viewers are occasional-use software. No one wants a time-consuming headache trying to figure them out.
Viewers range in price from free to $2,000. They will save your programmers from fiddling with toolkits to create customized viewers. They may even automate your company's workflow. Either way, they're worth a look.
Viewers hit the big time when Wang's (Billerica, MA 508-967-5000) Imaging for Windows started shipping as a part of Windows 95 and NT. It didn't ship with Windows 95 at first, but it's free when you download it from the Internet (www.wang.com). The real significance of this relationship is the exposure it's brought to the imaging industry.
Wang developed the viewer application for Microsoft. The objective: an application to live in the operating system that would offer a standard way to view, annotate, file and communicate with images. It had to be a "universal" viewer, meaning you could view anything created by a Microsoft 32-bit application. So, even though Wang's viewer is "universal," it can't view things created in another environment.
The beauty of Wang's viewer is that you can use additional viewers with it. Just install them and you can open the Wang viewer, as well as another viewer designed for Windows 95. With Imaging for Windows, you can only open one document per application. You can have multiple applications open, but you're still limited to one document per application. In NT, multiple people can look at the same image simultaneously if sharing parameters permit it.
Some say this is where viewers will end up -- integrated into an operating system. If that comes to fruition0, then perhaps the best thing for viewer companies to do now is to start teaming up with operating system creators who are planning to release upgrades. Whatever the companies decide to do, it's not your issue. There's still a healthy market of viewers out there geared toward a multitude of applications that will fit your needs.
Wang's Imaging for Windows is your basic viewer. No huge bells or whistles. But, hey it's free. What did you honestly expect? Or you can get a very capable one for free from TDF of Bethesda, MD. Contact them at 301-951-1133 or www.tdfcorp.com.The truth is that there are also a few viewers for sale that work with Windows. You ask: Why pay for a viewer when you can have one FREE? Read and see. You may be amazed at what a viewer can do for you.
Window with a View
ImageLib from Skyline Tools (North Hollywood, CA 818-766-3900) works with a few programming environments: C++, Visual Basic and Delphi. The Delphi version is available for either 16-bit Windows 3.1 ($140) or 32-bit Windows 95 ($170). This version consists of VCL (Visual Component Libraries) for Delphi users. It lets you manipulate, correct and add special effects and transitions to Delphi applications. It gives you full-color thumbnails and automatic color reduction. Since it comes with Delphi VCL source code, it's definitely customizable.
Look! There in your computer. It's an unknown application. It's an odd file format. It's, it's a viewer?! Since imaging hit the desktop, viewers have become super heroes with X-ray vision. They see through foreign file formats and boost your strength to access documents.
How many times have you gotten a diskette or CD in the mail with an unreadable file? For me, the number is too high to count and the frustration too flabbergasting to forget. That all changed when I became acquainted with a computerized super-hero: A viewer. It's truly a computerized Clark Kent, complete with a humble exterior and X-ray vision.
What is a viewer, really? Is it a utility? An application? It can be either, depending on its size and what it can do. Some viewers are as small as 80 KB, while others can be as large as 15 MB. They let you do lots of things and are quickly becoming an effective tool for business communication. Especially in imaging.
Think about it. Images originate from scanners, faxes, e-mail/Internet or shared files. Once you have an image, you need to read it. That's where "viewing" tools come in. You might need to see a document created by an application you don't have. It could be anything. A photo of a damaged car for an insurance claim. An E-size engineering drawing. A spreadsheet. A text document. An HTML file.
Depending on the viewer, you should be able to "view" any document regardless of its origination. In theory, you can view something in your PC that was created in a totally different operating system like Mac, Unix, CAD. For some products, it's true. These tend to be called "universal viewers." Don't believe it's a true universal viewer just because the box says so. Get a list of environments and file formats the viewer supports and make sure it supports all of yours.
Almost all viewers come with standard features like zoom and multipage viewing. These let you enhance images and see more than one page of a file. Multipage is tricky. Make sure you can view more than one page at a time in one open window. You don't want to open multiple windows to view multiple pages of a document at the same time. Don't confuse this with thumbnails, which are low-resolution images of what's inside the bigger file.
Now that you've seen the image, you might want to add something to it. How do you do that? Annotations. These are basic tools found in any viewer that include highlighting, creating boxes, drawing arrows, and in most cases sticky notes (notes you can attach to an image). Some let you put stamps on documents. Others do redacting (blocking out information on a document).
None of these things alter the original document. They float on top of an image and get saved as a separate file that accompanies the original file.
Exposing the View
Viewers are becoming more and more popular and complex. As a result, businesses are realizing their effectiveness in informed decision making. It eliminates constantly having to pass paper around manually -- adding changes, deleting others. You do that quicker with a viewer and speed up a decision making process. People want their viewers to do more and to do it quickly and easily. Viewers are occasional-use software. No one wants a time-consuming headache trying to figure them out.
Viewers range in price from free to $2,000. They will save your programmers from fiddling with toolkits to create customized viewers. They may even automate your company's workflow. Either way, they're worth a look.
Viewers hit the big time when Wang's (Billerica, MA 508-967-5000) Imaging for Windows started shipping as a part of Windows 95 and NT. It didn't ship with Windows 95 at first, but it's free when you download it from the Internet (www.wang.com). The real significance of this relationship is the exposure it's brought to the imaging industry.
Wang developed the viewer application for Microsoft. The objective: an application to live in the operating system that would offer a standard way to view, annotate, file and communicate with images. It had to be a "universal" viewer, meaning you could view anything created by a Microsoft 32-bit application. So, even though Wang's viewer is "universal," it can't view things created in another environment.
The beauty of Wang's viewer is that you can use additional viewers with it. Just install them and you can open the Wang viewer, as well as another viewer designed for Windows 95. With Imaging for Windows, you can only open one document per application. You can have multiple applications open, but you're still limited to one document per application. In NT, multiple people can look at the same image simultaneously if sharing parameters permit it.
Some say this is where viewers will end up -- integrated into an operating system. If that comes to fruition0, then perhaps the best thing for viewer companies to do now is to start teaming up with operating system creators who are planning to release upgrades. Whatever the companies decide to do, it's not your issue. There's still a healthy market of viewers out there geared toward a multitude of applications that will fit your needs.
Wang's Imaging for Windows is your basic viewer. No huge bells or whistles. But, hey it's free. What did you honestly expect? Or you can get a very capable one for free from TDF of Bethesda, MD. Contact them at 301-951-1133 or www.tdfcorp.com.The truth is that there are also a few viewers for sale that work with Windows. You ask: Why pay for a viewer when you can have one FREE? Read and see. You may be amazed at what a viewer can do for you.
Window with a View
ImageLib from Skyline Tools (North Hollywood, CA 818-766-3900) works with a few programming environments: C++, Visual Basic and Delphi. The Delphi version is available for either 16-bit Windows 3.1 ($140) or 32-bit Windows 95 ($170). This version consists of VCL (Visual Component Libraries) for Delphi users. It lets you manipulate, correct and add special effects and transitions to Delphi applications. It gives you full-color thumbnails and automatic color reduction. Since it comes with Delphi VCL source code, it's definitely customizable.
Imagination Software's (Silver Spring, MD 301-588-8411) multi-page viewer for Windows, called IMAGinE Viewer, lets you see two pages at once, with thumbnail views of additional pages of a file in one window. The user-friendly front end lets you pick from seven familiar document views that look like a book, folder, stapled pages, etc. When you buy this $500 viewer, you not only get the ActiveX controls for easy Internet integration, you also get the source code. This lets you modify and specialize the viewer any way you want.
Supporting 32-bit applications, it has the usual annotation features such as highlight, zoom and adding post-it notes. All annotations are saved as separate files alongside the original document. If you so desire, the ActiveX control that sits underneath the viewer lets you embed the annotations (so they become part of the original document). Typically, embedding annotations isn't something you want to do, but it's a nice feature.
ImageMaster Version 6.0 ($200) from Cimage (sold through Access Corporation in Cincinnati, OH 513-786-8350) lets you view many document types, regardless of how or where they were created, without the original software application. ImageMaster handles single- and multipage documents. If you don't feel like viewing several pages at once, use thumbnail views or open additional windows to see other pages in the multipage documents. You can also do word searches on documents being viewed.
It supports 150 of the most commonly used file formats, as well as black-and-white and color images. ImageMaster can also view documents created on Unix, DOS and Macintosh systems.
TMSSequoia's (Stillwater, OK 405-377-0880) ViewDirectorPro2 ($40) is an Internet Plug-In that lets you do everything most viewers do, like annotations, sticky notes and zooming -- all on the ưNet. You can copy, save, and print images from the Internet. The multipage image management lets you surf through some of the more elaborate Internet sites fairly quickly.
Available for Mac and Windows environments, ViewDirectorPro2 lets you hyperlink between sites using URLs. This is one of its more noteworthy features. Let's say you highlight the nose of a fox. You can link it to text about a fox's nose from another site with minimal clicking. Since it supports the JFAX (New York, NY 212-431-3833) service, you can view faxes through the Internet. Convert it to an image and transport it to e-mail.
Note It! ($100) from Gigatron Software (Irvine, CA 714-261-1777) is worth a look. Designed for Windows 95 and Windows NT, it has a 32-bit architecture. Its standard features include: annotations, sticky notes, pen (a freehand drawing tool) and even stamps. It also has some more high-scale features like voice notes. This lets you record your annotations when you add a sound card and microphone. My favorite feature is the tip box. You can set up Note It! to give you quick tips when you open the viewer.
Send mail with Note It! Add OLE objects to files. When you open a document using the viewer, add an icon for another application to the document. Double-click the icon and launch the application.
Use the paper clip button and connect other files to the viewer. This is really great for business applications. When you refer to another file while annotating a document, paper clip it to the file. Click the paper clip and attach that file to the document you're viewing -- so it always travels with the document.
DocuPACT Viewer 3.0 from InterTech (Atlanta, GA 770-804-8080) is $250 of PACT power. It looks and feels like Microsoft's Office 95 Suite, down to the same toolbars across the top of the window. Let's say you switch from viewing a Word document to viewing an Excel document. The toolbar changes from the standard Word toolbar to the toolbar you'd find in Excel. It goes a step further. When you're in one of the Suite applications, a yellow smiling face appears on the toolbar. Click that and you're in the viewer.
It also views engineering documents like CAD files. Search for any type of document and bring it into the viewing window. Split your viewing window to view as many documents as physically possible any way you want. Get a document and annotate it, add sticky notes, see any number of thumbnails.
You can even do redacting with it and create your own stamps. All of these things are created as OLE objects, so you have control over them.
Speaking of OLE -- the DocuPACT viewer has true OLE integration. To fit your needs, you can customize this thing any way you want. Insert any application you have access to using OLE and an icon appears on the document. Click that and you've just launched the program. Embed video and audio into viewed documents. If they're OLE objects, you can do it. Even drag and drop a file into the viewer. With certain documents, some information may be sensitive.
In fact, some documents may even be confidential or top secret. Besides redacting documents, you can add security parameters to them. Denote who can -- or can't -- access certain pages of files. This adds extra security precautions to those that already exist in your computer network.
For mail, it's MAPI compliant. It supports Lotus Notes for more functionality. Of course, InterTech didn't forget the Internet. ActiveX lets you plug it into your Web browser.
Kodak's (Rochester, NY 716-724-4000) Digital Science Image Display software ($200) is a scale-to-gray viewer. It turns scale-to-gray function on and off, so the scanned image looks better on the monitor than it is in the file. This is good, because when you scan a document at 200 dpi, it can lose some of its focus. Sometimes you need to view it in the best possible conditions.
You can do annotations, sticky notes (they appear as an icon), drawing tools and stamping (put stamps on documents like "approved" and "rejected") with their viewer. The stamping feature is of particular interest if you're using a viewer in a document delivery system where you're constantly looking at business documents.
Kodak focused on the needs of people who look at scanned business documents like insurance claims and receipts. Kodak designed a front-end that supports the ability to create folders and view up to 500 pages at once, though most users only view three to five pages at a time.
Watermark's (Burlington, MA 617-229-2600) Web Series viewer is free when you download it from www.filenet.com. Just press the Watermark button and there it is. It has a lot of features like printing and saving, turning pages, scale-to-gray, scroll bars and multi-page TIFF support. It works as a plug-in for Netscape 2.0 (or later) and Explorer 3.0 (or later).
Watermark's viewer is part of a bigger picture: Watermark Workspace (which is part of a still bigger picture -- the $300 Watermark Client). It lets you capture scanned or faxed documents, OCR them, rearrange them, insert any OLE object on top of the image, add sound clips (such as audio notes) to a document and send it through any e-mail package. Basically, anywhere you can send e-mail, you can send a workflow process.
Drag and drop any document type into folders right from the desktop. Then, when they're displayed in "Workspace," you can view any document without opening an application. In addition, you can launch applications from the viewers. The only restraint is your computer's memory.
Spiderman Viewers for Engineers
If you need to view oversized documents, the Myriad multiformat viewer ($600 up to a 10-person floating license) from Informative Graphics (Phoenix, AZ 602-971-6061) is right up your alley. We're talking big, like J-size (34" x 80") or even bigger, like 34" x 24 feet. The eye-glossing zoom feature lets you drag a small magnifier to any area of the document to blow it up. Zooming lets you go anywhere on the viewed document without losing track of where you are. This is important in big documents, where it's easy to get lost.
It's clear that Informative Graphics spent a lot of time evaluating how their viewer would be used when you look at its annotation abilities. This viewer doesn't just let you make annotations, it speeds up the workflow of a department or company based on those additions. Besides the typical annotation features, the change mark feature gives the change (annotation) a title and description.
Myriad lets you put "change marks" on lots of documents. Package them together and send them to someone's inbox as a group.
All that person has to do is bring up the first change mark. Once they view the first document and change marks, a button labelled "next" pops up. The person only has to press the "next" button to see the next document and change marks associated with it. That person can make more change marks to the document and send it back to your inbox. This truly optimizes time spent communicating about document changes.
Softdesk's (Henniker, NH 603-428-5000) ViewBase 7.5 is a document-handling viewer designed for engineering professionals. It runs on Windows 95, Windows NT and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. This version supports AutoCAD R13 C3 drawing file formats. You can even insert AutoCAD DWG symbols as redline entries. Link this viewer to any database application.
ViewBase, like Watermark's Web Series viewer, is part of a bigger picture. It's the front end to Softdesk AEC applications. It lets you view, search projects, redline and perform plotting for CAD drawings generated by other Softdesk products. This is an upgrade version. If you have ViewBase 7.x, it's free. If you have an older version, the price ranges from $150 to $350.
PreVIEW from Rosetta Technologies (Beaverton, OR 503-690-2500) ranges from $300 to $1,000. It has good viewer features -- especially for engineers and designers that deal with CAD. PreVIEW does a lot of your basic viewing things, like annotations, sticky notes and highlighting. You can also view documents without opening the original applications. You can view full 3-D, vector, grayscale, color, scanned and bitonal raster images, among others.
It opens as many viewing windows as your computer can handle, as well as thumbnail views. Open as many documents as you want in one viewing window. This clearly has its limits -- your monitor is only so large. It can handle the original layers of a CAD file by turning them on and off -- even measure, distance and angles. PreVIEW lets you open one version of (say) a drawing and superimpose it on top of another version of the same drawing. Different colors show any changes that have been made.
Now take all that, add $1,000 and you've got a truly interesting viewer, PreVIEW Conference. This viewer lets you show and discuss any number or type of documents with other people anywhere, no matter what operating system they are working on, in real-time. And the other people don't need PreVIEW Conference or even PreVIEW.
All you have to do is set up all the files you want to view during your conference. Get the IP address (the individual network address) of everyone you want included in the conference. As you type in their address, the viewer window you're looking at appears in their window. Attached to the window is a dialogue box with a list of participants, an area to request control over the viewer, and "Next Chairperson" (this denotes who in the conference will have control next). The chairperson has control over the viewer and can also pass off viewer control to someone else in the conference.
Naturally, it would be helpful to have a telephone conference call going on at the same time.
What better paperless way is there for five people in five different locations to talk about one set of documents? With this, you don't have to make other people invest in PreVIEW to be part of the conference. Don't think for a second you can't use this with the Internet or your intranet. Got a network address? You can be a conference participant.
Add $100 to either PreVIEW or PreVIEW Conference and get PreVIEW PDF. Why? To integrate Adobe Acrobat Exchange into your PreVIEW product.
This makes your viewer universal. You can work with Unix, Mac, PC, Windows. It also has the Verity search engine, which lets you do text searches based on document content.
Imagination Software's (Silver Spring, MD 301-588-8411) multi-page viewer for Windows, called IMAGinE Viewer, lets you see two pages at once, with thumbnail views of additional pages of a file in one window. The user-friendly front end lets you pick from seven familiar document views that look like a book, folder, stapled pages, etc. When you buy this $500 viewer, you not only get the ActiveX controls for easy Internet integration, you also get the source code. This lets you modify and specialize the viewer any way you want.
Supporting 32-bit applications, it has the usual annotation features such as highlight, zoom and adding post-it notes. All annotations are saved as separate files alongside the original document. If you so desire, the ActiveX control that sits underneath the viewer lets you embed the annotations (so they become part of the original document). Typically, embedding annotations isn't something you want to do, but it's a nice feature.
ImageMaster Version 6.0 ($200) from Cimage (sold through Access Corporation in Cincinnati, OH 513-786-8350) lets you view many document types, regardless of how or where they were created, without the original software application. ImageMaster handles single- and multipage documents. If you don't feel like viewing several pages at once, use thumbnail views or open additional windows to see other pages in the multipage documents. You can also do word searches on documents being viewed.
It supports 150 of the most commonly used file formats, as well as black-and-white and color images. ImageMaster can also view documents created on Unix, DOS and Macintosh systems.
TMSSequoia's (Stillwater, OK 405-377-0880) ViewDirectorPro2 ($40) is an Internet Plug-In that lets you do everything most viewers do, like annotations, sticky notes and zooming -- all on the ưNet. You can copy, save, and print images from the Internet. The multipage image management lets you surf through some of the more elaborate Internet sites fairly quickly.
Available for Mac and Windows environments, ViewDirectorPro2 lets you hyperlink between sites using URLs. This is one of its more noteworthy features. Let's say you highlight the nose of a fox. You can link it to text about a fox's nose from another site with minimal clicking. Since it supports the JFAX (New York, NY 212-431-3833) service, you can view faxes through the Internet. Convert it to an image and transport it to e-mail.
Note It! ($100) from Gigatron Software (Irvine, CA 714-261-1777) is worth a look. Designed for Windows 95 and Windows NT, it has a 32-bit architecture. Its standard features include: annotations, sticky notes, pen (a freehand drawing tool) and even stamps. It also has some more high-scale features like voice notes. This lets you record your annotations when you add a sound card and microphone. My favorite feature is the tip box. You can set up Note It! to give you quick tips when you open the viewer.
Send mail with Note It! Add OLE objects to files. When you open a document using the viewer, add an icon for another application to the document. Double-click the icon and launch the application.
Use the paper clip button and connect other files to the viewer. This is really great for business applications. When you refer to another file while annotating a document, paper clip it to the file. Click the paper clip and attach that file to the document you're viewing -- so it always travels with the document.
DocuPACT Viewer 3.0 from InterTech (Atlanta, GA 770-804-8080) is $250 of PACT power. It looks and feels like Microsoft's Office 95 Suite, down to the same toolbars across the top of the window. Let's say you switch from viewing a Word document to viewing an Excel document. The toolbar changes from the standard Word toolbar to the toolbar you'd find in Excel. It goes a step further. When you're in one of the Suite applications, a yellow smiling face appears on the toolbar. Click that and you're in the viewer.
It also views engineering documents like CAD files. Search for any type of document and bring it into the viewing window. Split your viewing window to view as many documents as physically possible any way you want. Get a document and annotate it, add sticky notes, see any number of thumbnails.
You can even do redacting with it and create your own stamps. All of these things are created as OLE objects, so you have control over them.
Speaking of OLE -- the DocuPACT viewer has true OLE integration. To fit your needs, you can customize this thing any way you want. Insert any application you have access to using OLE and an icon appears on the document. Click that and you've just launched the program. Embed video and audio into viewed documents. If they're OLE objects, you can do it. Even drag and drop a file into the viewer. With certain documents, some information may be sensitive.
In fact, some documents may even be confidential or top secret. Besides redacting documents, you can add security parameters to them. Denote who can -- or can't -- access certain pages of files. This adds extra security precautions to those that already exist in your computer network.
For mail, it's MAPI compliant. It supports Lotus Notes for more functionality. Of course, InterTech didn't forget the Internet. ActiveX lets you plug it into your Web browser.
Kodak's (Rochester, NY 716-724-4000) Digital Science Image Display software ($200) is a scale-to-gray viewer. It turns scale-to-gray function on and off, so the scanned image looks better on the monitor than it is in the file. This is good, because when you scan a document at 200 dpi, it can lose some of its focus. Sometimes you need to view it in the best possible conditions.
You can do annotations, sticky notes (they appear as an icon), drawing tools and stamping (put stamps on documents like "approved" and "rejected") with their viewer. The stamping feature is of particular interest if you're using a viewer in a document delivery system where you're constantly looking at business documents.
Kodak focused on the needs of people who look at scanned business documents like insurance claims and receipts. Kodak designed a front-end that supports the ability to create folders and view up to 500 pages at once, though most users only view three to five pages at a time.
Watermark's (Burlington, MA 617-229-2600) Web Series viewer is free when you download it from www.filenet.com. Just press the Watermark button and there it is. It has a lot of features like printing and saving, turning pages, scale-to-gray, scroll bars and multi-page TIFF support. It works as a plug-in for Netscape 2.0 (or later) and Explorer 3.0 (or later).
Watermark's viewer is part of a bigger picture: Watermark Workspace (which is part of a still bigger picture -- the $300 Watermark Client). It lets you capture scanned or faxed documents, OCR them, rearrange them, insert any OLE object on top of the image, add sound clips (such as audio notes) to a document and send it through any e-mail package. Basically, anywhere you can send e-mail, you can send a workflow process.
Drag and drop any document type into folders right from the desktop. Then, when they're displayed in "Workspace," you can view any document without opening an application. In addition, you can launch applications from the viewers. The only restraint is your computer's memory.
Spiderman Viewers for Engineers
If you need to view oversized documents, the Myriad multiformat viewer ($600 up to a 10-person floating license) from Informative Graphics (Phoenix, AZ 602-971-6061) is right up your alley. We're talking big, like J-size (34" x 80") or even bigger, like 34" x 24 feet. The eye-glossing zoom feature lets you drag a small magnifier to any area of the document to blow it up. Zooming lets you go anywhere on the viewed document without losing track of where you are. This is important in big documents, where it's easy to get lost.
It's clear that Informative Graphics spent a lot of time evaluating how their viewer would be used whe
