A heads up about some changes coming to the Bloom Comic Tool.
We have continued adding new capabilities to the too so that it will be great for picture dictionaries & story books with text, video, and other images on top of the image. The tool will be useful for much more than Comics, to the point that the old name is now misleading.
After some polling, we have settled on the a new name, “Overlay Tool”. Yes, that name doesn’t really tell you what it’s for, but at least people won’t dismiss it because “I’m not making a comic”.
As always we want Bloom to be as free as possible. However, what is “possible” has to include covering our expenses. For this reason, we have the Bloom Enterprise product which offers more advanced features. BE (Bloom Enterprise) is free for most SIL projects and all projects that don’t mind having a message on the back cover.
The Overlay Tool will be one of the features that requires Bloom Enterprise. People without BE will still be able to translate shellbooks that contain overlay objects into their language. They just can’t add new overlay items or modify their text color, background color, border style, transparence, etc. They will be able to move them and adjust them to fit their language.
We are making these changes with the next release of Bloom 5.0 (beta). Bloom 5.1 (alpha) has the video and image overlay capabilities.