Appendix A. Resources

Tons of Paint Shop Pro resources are available on the Internet. You can find websites, newsgroups, mailing lists, web rings, and more. I’ll take this opportunity to point you toward several of these resources to get you started.

Websites

The Web is a great place to start anytime you need a lot of information on any given subject, and Paint Shop Pro is no exception. There’s so much information available for Paint Shop Pro that it could take weeks or even months to get through it all.

www.corel.com

A good place to start is with the producers of the software. Stop by www.corel.com and click the Community button. From there, select Tutorials and then select Paint Shop Pro. Before you leave this site, don’t forget to check out the Creative Downloads for some Paint Shop Pro freebies and maybe sign up for the Paint Shop—Zoom In newsletter. Check out some of the past issues, too...it’s all there.

www.google.com

I know this seems obvious, but typing +”paint shop pro” and +tutorials into the Google search window will yield more than half a million results. As with anything on the Web, some of these will be good, some will be not so good, and some will be real treasures.

Web Rings

Web rings are sites that have a common topic and that are linked together in various ways. Often, you can simply find one of the websites within a ring and then follow a linear (somewhat linear depending on what you do at any given site) path from one site to the next. You can often choose a more random path through the ring.

Typing +”Paint Shop Pro” and +webring into Google will yield about 70,000 sites. The topmost (when I searched, at any rate) was the Paint Shop Pro Users Group website (see the following section). Give it a try and explore some of the Paint Shop Pro Web rings. You never know what you’ll find. Be careful, though, because this can be a huge timesuck and you might find the afternoon slipping away unnoticed. A good time to stop is when your stomach starts growling. It knows that you need to get up, stretch, move away from the computer, take a break, and have a snack. Stomachs are just smart that way.

User Groups

User groups used to be physical places where groups of enthusiasts would get together, say on the second Tuesday of every month in the basement of the local church or town hall, and discuss the object(s) of their enthusiasm. Now they’re found on the Internet.

www.pspug.org

User group meetings often feature guest speakers or demos, and there might be refreshments, too. There are still many of those groups around, and you can ask at your local computer store or check your local newspaper to see if there are any nearby and accessible. In my experience, these groups are very welcoming and are almost always looking for new members.

Aside from the Paint Shop Pro User Groups meetings that you can walk into physically, there are several of them online. One of the most popular is the Paint Shop Pro Users Group. Visit them at their website (www.pspug.org) to see if there’s anything there that might tickle your fancy. It will be a great starting point for other Paint Shop Pro resources both online and offline.

Newsgroups

If you’re not familiar with newsgroups, also known as Usenet, it’s a part of the Internet that’s still based on text, much like email, and you really should check it out. The newsgroups are somewhat like a giant bulletin board system in that they are interactive, but not in real time. Despite that, the newsgroups are a great, largely untapped online resource.

www.google.com groups

The way that newsgroups work is that you find a group that shares the same interest as you—comp.graphics.apps.paint-shop-pro, for example—and you read some of the posts there. Before you ask questions, which you can do by posting a message to the group (almost like sending an email), make sure you spend some time reading through the group. Doing so will do two things: First, it will teach you about the etiquette of the group (how things are done and, more importantly, what’s not done). Second, it might help you find that someone has already asked the same question recently and that it has been answered. (One of those things that’s frowned upon is asking a question that was asked recently. It shows that you didn’t take the time to read the group’s subjects, and people are reluctant to help those who don’t help themselves on the newsgroups.) Another reason to spend some time reading through the messages, or at least reading though the subjects, is that you might find a FAQ (frequently asked questions) and that document will be very useful should you decide to spend some time in the newsgroup.

So, how do you access the newsgroups, anyway? It used to be that you’d have to have a newsreader and access to the Internet, of course, along with access to a news server (a computer hooked to the Net 24/7 that holds the tens of thousands of messages in the various newsgroups). In other words, it wasn’t something the average computer user would attempt. Now, though, you can access newsgroups through Google. Simply visit www.google.com and click the Groups link at the top of the Google window.

From there, you can explore a little or simply head over to the Paint Shop Pro newsgroups. The most popular of them is the one mentioned previously. Check it out to see what you have been missing.