Vdraw A drawing program by Stephen Vermeulen Copyright (C) 1987 by Stephen Vermeulen ======================= Copyright Statement ======================== The program: "Vdraw 1.21" is Copyright (c) 1987 by Stephen Vermeulen. The author reserves all rights to this program. My name and address is: Stephen Vermeulen 3635 Utah Dr., N.W., Calgary, Alberta, CANADA, T2N 4A6 My phone number is: (403) - 282 - 7990 This version of Vdraw may not be distributed by anyone other than the author for compensation of any sort. ----------------------- Release 1.21 Notes -------------------------- This release introduces the AREA FILLING command, as well as some bug fixes and a faster LOAD routine. If you are interested in what changes have been made between versions of vdraw read the "Changes" file. -------------------------- Using Vdraw ------------------------------- If this is your first use of Vdraw take the time to read this file, and especially the next few lines. Vdraw allows you to use any screen resolution supported by the Amiga when you are editing, currently the screen format and the size of the bitmap you are doing your editing in are set in a file called "vdraw.profile" which is described later in this document. Vdraw also expects to find three other files during the startup sequence, these are: "vdraw.extra_icons", "vdraw.arrows_icons", and "vdraw.tools_icons". These three files are all IFF ILBM picture files (only 1 bitplane deep) which contain the pictures for the various icons used within Vdraw. You can edit these files if you do not like the icons I have produced. Vdraw will also search your system for all the fonts that you have in your system, and will allow you to use any extra fonts you may have added to the system. Vdraw also needs to open the fast floating point math libraries, so if you have stripped your workbench disk Vdraw will not run. The easiest way to make sure Vdraw finds all the special files it needs is to name the disk "Vdraw" and put all the special files in the root directory of the disk. If you have to put Vdraw somewhere else (ie. in a ram: disk or on a hard disk) then you just use an assign command to give the directory that contains the special files required by Vdraw the name "Vdraw:" ie. you do something like: assign Vdraw: my_disk:stuff/progs/more_stuff/doodling --------- General Pointers -------- Using Vdraw, the bottom row of icons selects the major tools. When you have selected a major tool the tool's icon will be highlighted and a new panel of modes for this tool will appear on the right hand side of the display, you use these mode icons to select the features of the tool you want to use. The major tools are (from left to right): 1. Line mode - Sketching - Straight lines - Horizontal / Vertical lines - and various line styles - ... the arrow head feature is not installed yet ... 2. Box mode - Hollow boxes - Solid boxes - Patterned boxes ... not installed yet ... - Invert an area. 3. Curve mode - Circles - Circular arcs, hold down the CTRL, left SHIFT, and left ALT keys to adjust parameters. CTRL and mouse moves adjusts one end point of the arc. LEFT ALT and mouse movements adjusts the other end point of the arc. LEFT SHIFT and mouse movements adjusts the radius of the arc. - Single control point Bezier curve, click on the first end point and then on the second end point, adjust the shape by moving the mouse, when you are satisfied click again. - Dual control point Bezier curve, click on the end point locations, then move the mouse while holding down either the LEFT SHIFT or the LEFT ALT keys. This adjusts the points which control the slopes at the end points. Finally click the select button when you are satisfied. - The + and wedge icons select modes for the drawing of circles and circular arcs. - note: to get circular circles on the printer you will have to set the aspect ratio parameter in the vdraw.profile file. See the profile section. 4. Spray Paint - While you hold the select button down and move the mouse you spray paint in the current pen colour. - To adjust the spray slide the R and D gadgets, the R gadget adjusts the radius of spray and the D gadget adjusts the density of spray. 5. Brush mode - first make some cuts in the cut mode, then ... - This allows you to brush with an area you have cut from the drawing surface, or a cut you have loaded. - You click on the two arrow icons to select the brush you want to use. - The brush and paste icons indicate whether you are in continuous brush mode or in single copy paste mode, click on these to select the mode. - Note, this mode will ignore any clicking of the CloseWindow gadget, this is to prevent memory deallocation problems. 6. Fill mode - You should do some cutting first to obtain some material for area fill patterns. Then, when you click on the fill icon you can select the pattern you wish to use by clicking on the UP/DOWN arrows in the top right of the screen. You next box the area in the drawing you wish to restrict filling. This prevents the drawing being damaged if the fill leaks through a hole in the boundary. Now click once in the area you want to be filled and voila! If nothing happens you might be very tight on memory, check the messages that are printed in the "Vdraw" window or the CLI window if you started from CLI. 7. Magnify mode - Upon entry yo this mode the screen is redrawn at an 8 fold magnification. The area that is magnified is the top left corner of the current window. - You can scroll the view with the arrow keys. - You do single pixel editing in this mode by clicking on the pixel you wish to set to the current pen colour. 8. Text mode - Click in the text requester at the bottom of the screen, hit return, and then when you hold the select button down you will drag the text around the screen. - Change the text style with the underline, boldface, italics, and extended mode icons. - Change the text drawing mode with the 1, 2, complement, and reverse video mode icons. - When you are satisfied hit the OK icon, otherwise hit the QUIT icon. 9. Font mode - Use this mode to select the font you wish to use for text typing. Note: if the system cannot load the font (because of memory problems) a message will be printed in the DOS window. The EMERALD fonts are particularly large. 10. Lock mode - Use this mode to lock areas to prevent them from being permanantly damaged. - box the area in the drawing you wish to backup, then hit the closed lock icon. - you can then lock another area following this procedure. - the arrow buttons will show you what areas are currently locked. - to restore an area that was locked and then damaged by some editing just select that lock with the arrows and then hit the open lock icon - to restore all locked areas hit the "many shackles" icon - to discard a locked area you do not want to restore any more, select it with the arrows and then hit the trashcan icon. 11. Cut mode - use this mode to cut areas from the drawing surface for use as brushes or to selectively save. - The arrow icons step you through the list of cuts. - The trashcan is used to discard any cuts you do not want anymore. - The currently displayed cut may be saved to disk using the TO DISK icon. - A file may be loaded from disk into a cut using the FROM DISK icon. - The number of cuts is only limited by available memory. - Note: the cutting process makes the currently selected Background Pen the transparent colour in the cut. 12. Fx mode - this mode, when implemented, will allow you to do all sorts of neat things with the various cuts that you have on hand, rotates, mirroring, stretching, distorting, shearing ... 13. Erase mode - hit ALL to erase everything to the background colour - or just box areas you want to erase. 14. Palette mixer - Select the colour to be adjusted with the drawing pen icon and the colour palette across the top of the screen - remix the colour with the sliders. 15. nothing yet 16. Print mode - This mode allows you all sorts of flexibility with printing - The BOX icon tells the printer routine to print only a boxed area. The default area is the current window view, however, you can just box any area and then that area will be printed. - The ALL icon tells the printer routine to print the full bitmap. - The AS icon tells the printer routine to AUTOSIZE the printing. This mode makes the printed output have the save aspect ratio as the screen displays. When this mode is on, the scaling factors are ignored. - The MULTIPAGE icon (the one with three overlapping boxes) is used if you want the output to appear as a number of pages that you cut and paste togeather. Note: this mode works best if you have a bitmap that is the same size as the printers page. - The scaling icons (1x, ... 5x, 1y, ... 5y) select the expansion factor for the X and Y directions to be applied to the bitmap. This allows you to use a bitmap that is (say) 1/4 the area of the full size printer's page and have a full page printout without any distortion of line thicknesses. - Once you are satisfed, press the print icon. 17. Disk mode - this allows you to do loading and saving of pictures and portions of pictures. - The BOX icon tells the save routine to save only the boxed area, and tells the load routine to restrict the loading to only the boxed area. - To set a boxed area just click in the main window and box the area desired. - The ALL icon tells the load and save routines to use up to the entire bitmap. - The P icon tells the save routine to save the data in packed format (less disk space used) - The U icon tells the save routine to save the data in an unpacked format. - The CM icon tells the save routine to save the screens ColourMap along with the routine, it tells the load routine to use any ColourMap data in the image file. - The NOT CM (CM with the line over top) icon tells the save routine not to save a colour map, and tells the load routine to ignore any colour map data that may be in the file. 18. Graphics mode - not implemented yet ... Possible features here include changing screen modes while in Vdraw. -------------------------- Vdraw Profile ------------------------------ There is a file called "vdraw.profile" that should be in the Vdraw: directory. This file contains several parameters that can be used to customize Vdraw to your particular requirements. A typical file might be: 1000 400 250 4 7 -11 100000 320 200 A line by line explaination follows, 1000 This number is the aspect ratio multiplied by 1000. 1000 means the pixel's height is the same size as the pixel's width. To make circles circular on a printer (Epson driver) where there are 120 dots per inch horizontally and 72 dots per inch vertically you calculate the value thus: 72 --- * 1000 = 600 120 400 This is the width of the super bit map. You can make this quite large (say 1000), possibly the best thing to do is to make this the same as the number of horizontal pixels your printer prints. (The Epson driver seems to do 120 pixels per inch, so I use 960) 250 This is the height of the super bit map, for an 11 inch page on an Epson I use 720. 4 This is the number of bit planes to use, this sets the number of colours you get. Currently, this can be 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. Note that if you use a 640 wide screen this can only be 1, 2, 3, or 4. 7 -11 These will be used for arrowheads when they are implemented. 100000 This is the refresh rate of the zoom lens that comes on in the lower right hand corner of the display when the menu button is pressed. This is the number of micro seconds between refreshes of the display. 320 This is the width of the screen to use, this is normally either 320 or 640, however, you can specify other values if you have a monitor that can display the overscan area. But, if you specify some non standard value you must realize that intuition only allows you to move the mouse to position 319 or 639. 200 This is the height of the screen to use. This is normally either 200 or 400 for North American systems, if you live in Europe you can probably use 256 or 512, this has NOT been checked, let me know if it works! Again, you can use non-standard values if you want to squeeze a bit more onto the screen. -------------------- Suggested vdraw.profile files -------------------- To use Vdraw as a black and white page layout program on an Epson type printer try: 600 960 720 1 7 -11 100000 640 400 To use Vdraw to paint a Low res picture: 1000 320 200 5 7 -11 100000 320 200 To use Vdraw to paint a High res picture: 1000 640 400 4 7 -11 100000 640 400 To use Vdraw to paint a High res picture without screen flicker: 1000 640 400 4 7 -11 100000 320 200 To use Vdraw to paint a MacPaint size (576 wide by 720 high) picture 1000 576 720 1 7 -11 100000 320 200 ------------------------- Extra Credits ---------------------------- The two drawers of pictures that also appear on this disk came from Fred Fish's disk #45. I have included these so that the user can see that the load function really does work. NOTE: currently these pictures load rather slowly, this is because of the routine I use to handle transparancy, this will be fixed in the next release. Let me express my thanks to Charlie Heath at MicroSmiths Inc. for putting his file name requester (that I am using) into the public domain. This requester appears on Fish Disk #35 along with the following copyright statement: ::::::::::::::::::::::The Copyright Statement::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Demo Program for using FILE NAME REQUESTER This program shows how to use the file name requester, getfil.o (c) 1986 by MicroSmiths, Inc. Permission is granted to use the object code routine 'getfile' in any Amiga program, commercial or otherwise, EXCEPT that it shall NOT BE used in any Text Editor, and it shall NOT BE SOLD as an OBJECT MODULE or in a LIBRARY. :::::::::::::::::::End of The Copyright Statement:::::::::::::::::::::::::::