Copyright 1990 L & V Productions This material is the property of L & V Productions. The program TRACE and this supporting DOC file are freely distributable as long as they are not sold for profit! ***REQUIRES*** Any Amiga that can run DPAINTIII in Hi-res 16 color mode. In addition 100000 bytes of Fast ram are required. KARA ANIM Fonts. BEGIN DOC FILE: **BACKGROUND** My partner in crime(Norbert Vienneau) runs the local University Audio/Video production centre. Last month he purchased the Kara Anim Font series. These are the fonts that work with DPAINTII to simulate realtime/online Hand Script Titling. We were very pleased with the results but the building process was very slow and tedious. He used them for one production and then put them away. This program "TRACER", is one solution to the above problem. **STARTING TRACER** Before you start "TRACER" you should have DeluxePaintIII loaded in 640*400 16 color mode. Select the Kara font(or any Font) and type in the text you want to have "Handwritten". Now pick up all of the text you just entered as a Brush. We want to copy this Brush to the Spare screen in exactly the same place as it is now. You can use the Co-ordinate system or do the following: With the text picked up as a Brush, position it as close as you can DIRECTLY over the existing text on your screen. Then holding down the RIGHT AMIGA key use the CURSOR keys to force an exact alignment. Remeber do not touch the mouse!. When the Brush aligns up press the J key to jump to the Spare screen. Again without touching the Mouse, press the LEFT AMIGA KEY AND the LEFT ALT KEY simultaneously to STAMP the brush onto the Spare screen. So you should now have 2 identical screens containing the text. Now we need to adjust the palette. Colors 8-15, which is the entire RIGHT column of the palette must be BLACK. An easy way to do this is copy Color 0(BLACK) to Color 8. Then copy Color 8 to Color 15. Now do a spread from Color 8 to Color 15. The last step is to select the Largest square built in Brush. With this selected press the + KEY 5 times to enlarge this Brush to a 10*10 pixel size. Now press the ALT and Z keys at the same time. A set of Cross hairs appears over the pointer. Press and HOLD the Left mouse button, now move it towards the UPPER LEFT corner of the 10*10 pixel brush. Release the Left mouse button and you should be "HOLDING" the brush at position 0,0 relative to the top upper left hand corner of the Brush. You are now ready to start the TRACER program. Slide down the DeluxPaintIII screen until you can see the Workbench. Or you can Click on the Screen Front/Back gadget. If nothing happens then you should pick "WORKBENCH" from the Menus to "OPEN" the Workbench. Tracer may be started from the CLI or simply by double-clicking with the Left mouse button on its ICON. For the moment nothing will happen other than your memory gauge will show a drop of 100000 bytes. Slide the DeluxePaint screen back up, or again Click on the Screen Front/Back gadget. Click anywhere on the DeluxePaint screen to activate it. Check to see that the palette is setup properly. Your Brush should be 10*10 pixels with the HANDLE in the top left corner. Press the RIGHT AMIGA key to begin. A small WINDOW opens along the top of the Screen on top of the MENU bar. This is only to show you that TRACER is ready to accept MOUSE INPUT. TRACER will now store your Mouse positions anytime that the LEFT Mouse button is held down. All you do is trace or draw directly over your text. You must completely erase/draw over the existing text. Remember it is only the PATH you draw that is saved, not the current results. So try to draw exactly as you would like to see the TEXT revealed. That is start from Left-Right and follow the natural course of the Handwriting. Really overdue and exagerate this part, making sure that you go a little higher and lower than the edges of the Font. The more you draw the cleaner the reveal will be. This part will take some experimentation. For instance if you find the Text is being revealed too fast(NEXT STEP!) then simply Draw more around the Font next time. You will catch on fast! TRACER will store up to 10000 points. If you ever see the small Window tracer opens close up, than you have reached that maximum. When you are done press the ESC key. This ends the INPUT. Now press the J key to jump to the other Screen. It should hold a CLEAN copy of the text. Press the F10 and/or F9 keys to hide the MENU and Gadget areas. Press the RIGHT AMIGA KEY to begin the Handwriting on the Screen! When the reveal is done you have 2 options. 1. Press the Right Mouse button to exit Tracer & resume Dpaint 2. Press the Left Mouse button to restart the reveal process. Nothing will happpen until you press the RIGHT AMIGA key to begin the revealing of the text. This gives you time to start the VTR or whatever. You can keep previewing the effect indefinately as described above. If you want to slow down the effect or if pieces of the letters are not being revealed, then you must quit TRACER and go back to the start. This time draw lots of extra paths as you erase/draw over the text. I realise this could use more work and could be a lot friendlier to use. Please understand this is a PD excerpt from a commercial TEXT animation product I am currently working on. There will be other effects released in cutup PD form this Fall. If you are into Video work also see the Public Domain program VBHI, which is a Titler and Teleprompter. Please feel free to report any bugs/suggestions to: Stephen Lebans PLINK SLEBANS L & V Productions 110 Columbus Ave Moncton, New Brunswick Canada E1A-5E4 PHONE: (506)-532-0094 FAX: (506)-859-2709 Please note We are on the EAST Coast!!