DevWare Note: To copy these ARexx programs into your system, open up a CLI or Shell (Workbench 2.0 user's can simply do a Right-Amiga+E from the workbench) and type this command: COPY WB121:DonsGenies/Genies/#? to Rexx: [RETURN] DON'S PPAGE GENIES Version 1.0 This is the first release version; there are probably still some bugs. Use with caution. Let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions. Don Cox 5 Cornfield Rd Middlesbrough Cleveland TS5 5QJ England A shareware fee of $15 or equivalent (cash is easiest) will bring you a copy of the latest update. I hope to add some more genies to the collection, including some for Pro Draw. MAKE BAR GRAPHS These are debugged versions of the ones supplied by Gold Disk, with the added feature of allowing you to select any font. Future development - bar charts made of little pictures, as in Adobe Illustrator. STEP AND REPEAT DELUXE This starts with a single box, which could contain text or an image, and generates a wide variety of patterns. The default spacing is the size of the box, so if you just set the number of rows and columns you will get a simple tiling arrangement. The boxe If you set the X and/or Y scales, the boxes will change size across the page. Setting the X offset gives a brick wall effect. The offset angle is meant for patterns such as 60 degree triangular repeats. Only the X spacing is used in this case. If you set a rotation angle each unit is set to a greater angle than the last. Try this on a straight grid. If the X and Y settings for the centre of rotation are the centre of the original box, each box rotates around its own centre, so you get a straigh Setting both X and Y spacing to zero, with a suitable centre of rotation and rotation angle, will give a circle of units. If you also set either a spiral scale (make this number very nearly 1) or a spiral increment (this might be about the same as the hei Spiral scale gives a logarithmic spiral; spiral increment gives an equidistant spiral. Set a negative number for increment to spiral inward. If you get too ambitious you will run out of memory, especially if the units are bitmaps. Things that work immedia To get concentric circles, first make a vertical single column at 12 o'clock and then generate a circle from each unit in turn. Use "Same settings" on entry. All kinds of combination settings will give various unexpected results. BORDERS FRAMES This puts frames around boxes and at the same time sets a margin all round the box, so that bitmaps do not cover up the frame. MARGINS ALL ROUND To save you having to type the same number in four times when setting a uniform margin. BORDERS REPEATS This is for putting decorative borders around boxes. The borders are made from design units (boxes containing clips or bitmaps), which must be visible on the screen so that they can be clicked on. There is a selection of PDraw clips of fleurons provided for experimentation, and a few bitmaps. You can use up to five different units to make up a repeat pattern; the pattern is specified by typing in letters. The pattern length is limited only by the s The program will not flip units top-to-bottom. If you want this, clone the box containing the original fleuron and set the Y scale to a negative number; this will invert the image. It is best to set up your set of boxes containing the original units either in the bottom margin or off the page. You can have corner units only or side units without corners. The original corner unit, unlike the side units, can be rotated to suit if it i BORDERS SIMPLE SHAPES These draw various borders around boxes, using data built into the genie. Unlike Borders Repeats, you do not have to provide any boxes, except the one that needs a border. Several simple geometrical patterns are provided. The resulting border is in a sing The patterns use the current line and fill colours. You can get some nice effects by superimposing a coloured border on a box with a thick coloured frame, or two different borders over each other. Note that the current line and fill colours can only be ch Try asking for very thick borders - up to almost half the box width. If the box is at an angle, PPage sometimes has difficulty drawing it on the screen (it may fill in solid), but the printout may be OK. Sometimes the screen is OK and the printout is solid. MAKE PIE CHART This generates a plain 2D pie chart from a set of percentages and labels which you enter. BOOKLET If you wish to lay out an A5 booklet consisting of a number of sheets of A4 paper stapled in the middle, this genie will arrange the pages for you. You design the work on a series of landscape format A4 pages, each showing a pair of facing pages for the f The first A4 page will be the outer cover, i.e. the first and last pages. When the design work is complete, run this genie. It will save your design and then cut each page in half and rearrange the halves correctly for printing. Of the resulting pages, the first half are for printing on one side of the paper; you then turn the The genie uses .eps files to split the pages, so they will appear as blank grey rectangles, and will only print on a Postscript printer. However, you can save a Postscript file to disk and then print it out on any printer using the P.D. program "Post", if The genie will handle any size, not just A4. For an A4 booklet, you would design on A3 pages (landscape format). LANDSCAPE PAGE This converts an existing page from portrait to landscape format or vice versa. It sets the Postscript output parameters accordingly. Useful for working on double-page spreads. COPY BOX TO PAGES LINKED STEP AND REPEAT LINKED These are both just the same as the standard ones but the resulting boxes are in a linked text chain. REPLACE BOXES ON PAGES This is useful if you have done "Copy Box to Pages" and then you want to make a change throughout. For instance, you have put a neat little box at the top of every page giving the date of a magazine, and then you realize you have the wrong month. Or you w The boxes must have their top left corners in exactly the same place on each page. IMPORT BITMAP 1 to 1 Most useful for owners of PAL Amigas, which have square pixels. If you own ADPro, you can set the exact size of an image by using the "Define Pixel Aspect Ratio" command. PPage will pick up this info on loading. Otherwise, it normally scales the image to STYLE TAGS AUTOCREATE This goes right through a document and creates a style tag for each different text style it finds. Existing styles are not changed, but slight variants such as the use of italics will be given a new name (a requester allows you to ignore these small chang The genie will also label all matching text as having the same tag, so you can define a tag from one bit of text in a long document and after running this genie alter all similar text, even when you forgot to use tags to start with. A list of styles is saved as a text file in Ram:, for checking. Remember that you can save and load a list of styles as a text file from the menu. STYLE TAGS CREATE SINGLE Much the same but does only one and gives you the chance to set the name at the time. It just saves your having to type in all the specs by hand in the usual requester. FIT TEXT TO BOXES This will adjust the size of the text in an article until it is the largest size that will fit into the available box or chain of boxes. On a long article, there may be a few blank lines at the end: you will find that increasing the size by 1/8 point caus When fitting headlines into boxes remember that it is the bounding box of the type that is fitted: letters are often quite a bit deeper than you expect. Make sure your box is deep enough or the size will be limited by height, not width. TEXT TO GRID Fits the bounding boxes of the text (not the baselines) to the current grid. If the grid is much larger than the text you may get two or more lines of text in each grid space. This genie is useful for lining up text in adjacent columns. Line spacings are BOXES TO GRID GRID FROM BOX Obvious, really. BOXES NAME ALL This invents a not very imaginative name for every box in the document (except those already named). BOXES FRONT TO BACK This genie has a rather messy interface, but it works. It gives you a list of the boxes on the page, and you click on the names in the order you want them, starting at the front. You don't have to click all of them. Useful when you have a jumble of overla DOC FILES Some Latin and some English body copy. The Latin is real Latin not fake (like Lorem ipsum): it is from Vitruvius and is all about seige engines and battering rams. Note the use of S (semi) for 1/2 as in XXIV S. You will need hyphenation on as there are lo The English is a complete chapter from Joshua Slocum's "Sailing Alone Round the World", which is one of the best books ever written. It fills about six pages. There are also a few poems for you to practice your drop capitals on. They will appeal more to science fiction lovers and fractal freaks than to those who like Shelley.