Let your family and friends know you are thinking about them with new SD Card Creator card sets from Softdisk! Now you can design your own electronic greeting cards, complete with custom graphics, photos, clipart, sounds and animation or save time with the included pack of 15 pre-made cards that are ready to send, now! Send them electronically to anyone with an E-Mail address and save money on postage.

SD Card Creator allows you to easily import your own graphics, text and sound (BMP, WAV, and MIDI files). Each card file allows you three screen segments (pages) with 10 graphics per page for optimum flexibility for your creativity.

Included on this issue are 15 professionally designed cards on the following topics:

• Anniversaries
• Mother's Day
• Graduation
• Birthdays
• Get Well
• Variety

Of course, you can modify any of these designs and customize them anyway you want! Let your creative juices run wild and send a unique, personalized, electronic card to friends and family.

With SD Card Creator you can create great electronic cards to brighten someone's day all year long!

How to use our cards...

The most important thing to remember is to press F1 any time you need help when running SD Card Creator. That said...

Run SD Card Creator, then go to the File menu and select the Open option. You will see the current directory structure has the following folders:

Annivrsy
Birthday
GetWell
Graduate
MomsDay
Variety

These directories are an easy way to categorize the kind of cards we've given you. The card templates are inside directories inside these general category directories. Specifically:

Annivrsy \Wine
Birthday \Jack
Birthday \Herd
         \Jack
GetWell  \Bed
         \Cast
Graduate \HandShke
         \Job
Variety  \Cat
         \Hope
         \Listen
         \MissYou2
         \Miss_You
         \Romance
         \Say_Hey

Open the directory you want, highlight the .SSP file and click Okay. This loads the template into SD Card Creator. Double-click on segment one and then click on the Text button to personalize your card. (Note! Most cards are only one segment long, but some have two or even three segments. If it's a multi-segment card, you may have to enter text in all segments or only in certain segments. Just double-click on each segment on the main screen and then on the Text button to find out.)

General rules on entering text: Just type in whatever message you want. Press "Enter" only when you want to add a new line to the text--don't let the lines get too long! Click on the OK button when the text is finished. You'll see your text appear on the screen--is it correct? If not, click on the text button and edit it.

You can also change the font style, color and size by clicking on the "Font" button under the text editing box. If you choose a fancy font, you should check the "Snapshot" button on the text dialog. This insures that whoever you send the card to will see the font you used even if they don't have it on their system.

When the text looks right, click on the OK button on the segment dialog. There may be a warning that comes up about repeating forever--that's what you want it to do so click Okay. This gets you back to get back to the main screen.

You can Preview your card by clicking on the 4th button from the right on the tool bar or by pressing CTRL+P or by going to the Preview option in the View menu. This will let you know if you've made all the text changes in a multi-segment card.

Now you need to make your card. Either go to the File menu and select Build, or click on the 3rd icon from the right on the tool bar. Click OK on the build information dialog that comes up. The next dialog that comes up allows you to name the card file; you can just click OK here, too. (If you want to rename it, you can use only 8 letters.)

You will then be asked if you want to make an installer--answer Yes here. Leave the filename the same--it will be changed to add an underscore "_" to the end or as the last character so you'll know it's the installer. Finally, you be asked if you want to compress the installer. You should click Yes unless you have a really slow system. (Though most of the cards are fairly small even without compression.)

The resulting .EXE file is your personalized card! Give it to someone and they just run it like any other program!

A final word about the cards...You can mix and match bits and pieces to your heart's content to come up with new cards! These are just convenient templates for you to use... let your creativity run wild!