title Icons and Pums Nov 3 1991 keys Next Page:%2 -:%1 Home Page:!Home First Here:%1 AREXX Help:AREXX Main Pum:MainPum Animation Pum:AnimPum ~ text Pums - the Vapor Paint parameter interface A Pum is a Pop Up Menu . I didn't like the usual requesters and intuition stuff so I wrote my own (which looks suspiciously but coincidentally like WB 2.0). Pums usually take over the entire screen and fill it with text, icons, buttons and numericals. Pum buttons can have keyboard equivalents. A numerical looks like a numeric string gadget, but you can click on the top or bottom of a digit instead of typing in a new value. You can also hold the mouse down and move left and right to advance or decrease the Pum's value in the "column" you have clicked on. i.e. if you clicked on the 3 in 12345.67, it would advance or decrease by 100's. Typing will also work, and you can tab to the field you want to change. Backspace will erase the current value. Note: SMPTE time fields re-interpret your keys as frames, thus typing "100" shows as "3:10". There's also a color bar which is under color numericals which will poorly clue you into the color you have chosen. This color is meant for the color render modes, not the normal "B&W". ~ section 2 keys Next Page:%3 Previous Page:%1 Home Page:!Home First Here:%1 ~ text The Icons and the Icon Bar Much tougher to understand is the system of Icons, which is one of the most important concepts of Vapor Paint. Each move or action which you hope to use to construct a finished frame (or sub frame) in an animation is registered as an Icon on the screen. Thus, each mouse move which is converted to a vector shows up there as as Vector Icon. By convention , I'll refer to them in square brackets,e.g. [A]. Each of the Icons has two parts, the "Picture" part ( which usually looks like a big letter) and a "Number" above it. The "Number" identifies the icon among others of its type, which is indicated by the "Picture". Even though the number goes up to 9999, there's really a longword there - so feel free to overflow past 64K! When you click on the Number with the left button, the Icon becomes the Current Icon. Doing the same with the right button will bring up the Pum associated with it. Clicking on the Number of an icon is not the same as clicking on the Picture of the icon (see below). ~ section 3 keys Next Page:%4 Previous Page:%2 Home Page:!Home First Here:%1 AREXX Help:AREXX Main Pum:MainPum Animation Pum:AnimPum Little Arrow:%7 ~ text The Icon Bar The row of Icons at the bottom of the screen is really a flattened out section of a tree which is traversed to create each frame! It's flat in order to give more drawing space. Here's how to read it - it looks sort of like this: [1] [2][2][2][2][2][2] [3] [->] [4][4][4][4][4][4] [5] 1 is the parent of the "current" Icon. [2]s are left siblings of the current Icon, [3] is the current Icon. [4]s are right siblings of the current Icon, and [5] is the first decendent of the current Icon. Ignore the "arrow" Icon for now. In your mind, you'd have to think of it as: [1] ...[2]....[3]....[4]... [5] ~ section 4 keys Next Page:%5 Previous Page:%3 Home Page:!Home First Here:%1 ~ text Of course, there is more of the tree outside of the range of this view. If the current Icon is a Vector [V] or a note vector [Nv] then a bounding box will appear around it. A square-ish mark is put at the start of the vector and a round-ish mark is put at the end. These marks may clutter up the screen, so you can use another feature to highlight the current vector: ALT-Enter will run a sprite along the length of the vector in the order of its vertices. This sprite "parks itself" in the upper left corner is the current Icon is not a [V] or [NV]. You now can turn the "box feature" off by using the "5" key. To build a frame, the tree is traversed in a top to bottom , left to right fashion, executing some action or setting at some SMPTE time, and interpolating vectors, views and colors when not on a key frame. ~ section 5 keys Next Page:%6 Previous Page:%4 Home Page:!Home First Here:%1 ~ text Icon Navigation You can navigate through the tree in several ways: with the arrow keys or by clicking on the Icon numbers themselves. The unshifted arrows act in a straightforward way. "Up" moves you to the parent, "down" to the child, "left" left and "right" right. Shifting "left" and "right" takes you to either end of the current level. Shift "up" puts you at the top Icon, while shift "down" brings you back to the place you were when you shifted "up". Other operations are put on the angle brackets. The left angle "<" puts you at the last key frame, if you are at or below the key frame level. The right angle ">" brings you to the next key frame. Note that the current time and the key frame times change with this operation. Shifted angle brackets do the same, but for sequences instead of key frames. Alt-ed angle brackets will take you to the last or next instance of the current Icon in numeric (creation) order. You can make a vector current from the screen by clicking with the right mouse button on one of its endpoints. To look at the current icon's Pum, you can click on its Number with either button, or use the handy key equivalent "ALT-Return". ~ section 6 keys Next Page:%7 Previous Page:%5 Home Page:!Home First Here:%1 ~ text Hiding and Selecting Groups of Icons Icons are also the easiest way you can change the hidden and selected properties of objects. Selected objects are used in some group transformation operations. Selected objects' icons are yellow. You can select an object by clicking on the "Letter" part of the Icon with the left button. When an object is selected, it selects all its decendents. Clicking again deselects it. A hidden vector is not rendered. A hidden keyframe is not rendered but its delta-time is used. Hidden Icons are "ghosted". Clicking with the right mousebutton will hide an Icon. The same effects are available as "alt-up arrow" and "alt-Down arrow". Note the vectors involved will change their selected status if visible and on the screen. Hidden vectors will hide on the next refresh. To help you hide all but some related material, the H key will hide all siblings and their children except for the current one, the previous and next Icons. This is useful when you have scads of keyframes to hide. ~ section 7 keys This Is The Last:%7 Previous Page:%6 Home Page:!Home First Here:%1 ~ text There are 3 Pums which are not associated with any Icons at all: only 2 are currently useful. The "Main Pum" or "Top Pum" appears when you click on the very top of the screen with the right button. It also can be called up with the keyboard command "Shift Space". The top of the screen has some stats about the size of the current tree: number of links, number of vertices, number of vectors... The default settings for many things can be found under this line: such as the current time, default pen dimensions, default color, edge color, pen , number of frames for Key Frame Icons [Kf] and View Icons [Vw]. See the "AREXX" help file for special instructions under ARexx, and also the "Main Pum" help file. The Right Pum (click on the right of the screen, or alt-space) allows you to set the work screen colors - converted from 64-bit to 3 bit! Getting back to that little arrow in the Icon bar: The arrow in the icon bar tells Vapor Paint where to put newly created Colors and Pens, that is, to the left of the current Icon or to the right, which is the default. In some rare situations, the left is preferable. Click on the empty space to the left of the Current Icon to move the arrow to the left. ~