The 640 MEG Shareware Studio 2/The 640 Meg Shareware Studio CD-ROM Volume II (Data Express)(1993).ISO/ansi/wizdr175.zip/WIZDRAW.DOC

Text File | 1991-08-27 | 15KB | 303 lines

                                 WIZDRAW
                               Version 1.75
                      (C)opyright 1991 Kevin Francis






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                                  Index
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Legal Whatnots

Introduction to WizDraw

WizDraw's Purpose

Basic Use
    Movement
    Putting stuff on the screen
    The Menus
    Blocking
    Special Effects
    Animation

Other stuff (Tips and whatnots)

Future Versions

Registration




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                               Legal Whatnots
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    {Insert Generic Disclaimer Here}

    My disclaimer : By using this program, you agree not to make me pay for
                    anything which this program does, or pay for anything for
                    that matter.

    WizDraw 1.75 was written and programmed using Borland's Turbo Pascal 5.5.
    Editing of the source code was done using QEdit by SemWare.


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                           Introduction to WizDraw
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    Approximately November 23, 1990, Kevin Francis decided "Hey, I don't really
like what's available for drawing my Ansi screens and such," so, he made his
own, suited to how he figured would be nice.  A couple months later, he
released WizDraw version 1.1.  The only problem was that it was still
un-finished.
    Kevin Francis, being an interested and very excited programmer at this
point, quickly released version 1.2, which fixed a bunch of bugs in 1.1.
The SysOps in his area quickly said that they didn't like WizDraw and asked
Kevin Francis not to "clutter" their hard drive with "numerous" versions
of a program that wasn't even close to finished.  So, starting early January,
Kevin Francis started working on Version 1.5.
    He released this version with high hopes and found out that it too stunk.
Because he didn't want to give up on this idea, he quickly started on version
1.75.  Why version 1.75?  Because it was half way between 1.5 and 2.0, and
he decided that he wanted to make 2.0 the version you get to pay for.
    This time, he backed off a bit and took a good look, and decided that the
best way to handle this project was to make a list of things to fix.  This
took an incredibly long time.  Everything needed to be fixed, and once he
fixed one thing, he caused another problem.  Fortunately, however, he got a
large number of things fixed and added some rather interesting features,
making WizDraw much easier to work with.
    Some people who have looked at version 1.5 may think, "Hey, this thing
sucks!!"  Some people may as well look at version 1.75 and think the same
thing.  Fortunately, however, 1.75 is MUCH better and, according to the
programmer, is the best thing available for drawing little ansi screens and
animations.
    Still off in the future, however, is an idea of a program which will be
worth the $20 that you have to pay for it.  Of course, this may seem a bit
greedy on the part of Kevin Francis, but don't worry, that's not until the
next version, anyway.


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                              WizDraw's Purpose
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    There are two reasons for the existence of WizDraw: modems and
programmers.  Because modeming is made a lot more enjoyable thanks to the
wonderful invention of Ansi, BBS's started to need people to draw things
for opening screens, menus, bulletins and all around whatnots.    This often
tumbles over into the area of just fooling around for the halibut, and this
is made much easier with a better drawing program.
    For programmers, who will mostly be just drawing screens for their
various programmers, one of the basic file formats which is used is saved
in the direct way in which it is displayed on a text screen.  Therefore,
it may just be loaded into any various memory location to be copied to the
screen.


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                           Basic Use of WizDraw
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    I have told people a number of times that the best way to learn how to
use WizDraw is to fiddle with it.  Unfortunately, however, some people don't
like fiddling, and quickly give up, figuring the program to be useless.
Because I don't want a whole bunch of people thinking my best work of art
ever to be worthless, I will explain some of the finer points of its use,
starting at downright obvious and working my way up.

Movement

    This is accomplished, of course, with the cursor keys.  On every set of
cursor keys, there is a button for up, down, left, and right (hopefully).
You may notice, as well, that many are equipped with four more buttons which
do things totally different.  Many programs such as games use these for
combinations of keys, called "diagonals," and yet others use them for moving
to edges of the screen/text.  The default is to use them as diagonals, but
you may toggle this using Ctrl-D, in which case they will function as Home,
End, PgUp and PgDn.
    If you do use the diagonals, you may find moving from one part of the
screen to another rather inconvenient.  To move to the edges of the screens
whilst also using diagonals, push Ctrl and the direction you want, and the
cursor will jump to the edge of the screen.
    Whenever you move around, you can keep track of where you are by looking
in the bottom left corner of the screen, where it shows the X and Y co-
ordinates.  X is how far left you've gone, and Y is how far down.

Putting stuff on the screen

    Obviously, that is the entire idea behind this program.  In particular,
however, it helps to know how to draw extremely simply.  The simplest way
to do this is with the keys on your keyboard such as "g", "f", ".", and "*".
After you push one of these normal keys, the cursor will move one to the
right, waiting for the next one to be pressed.
    But what if you don't WANT it to move right?  Fortunately, I already
thought of this and you can keep it from doing that by pushing Ctrl-M.
    Now, once you've gotten the hang of that, you can move to the next step
up, the function keys.  You will notice that on the bottom right side of
the screen, there are fourty little garbled characters in different colors.
Each one of these is an F-Key combination.  The ones in blue are just normal
and can be accessed by pushing the F key which coincides with how far over
it is.
    The different colors mean what you push while pushing an F-Key to get
that combination.  The green ones are accessed with the Shift key (hold
it down and push the F-Key you want), the cyan ones are accessed with the
Ctrl key, and the red ones are accessed with the Alt key.  You may notice
that when you push the Shift, Ctrl, and Alt keys a small indicator lights
up on the status line telling that it is pushed.  Sometimes that will stay
on when a key isn't being pushed, but don't worry, the program goes by the
keys, not the indicators.
    It can get rather difficult sometimes to figure out which F-Key you
want to push.  If you would rather look at them ten at a time, push Ctrl-E
and beside each character it will show which F-Key to push.

The Menus

    Yes, there is a menuing system in this program, as it tells you on the
status line when you start up.  To get into the menu, push Esc and it will
pop up.  Once you get in the menu, move the highlited bar to the option you
would like using the cursors and push return to select it.

Blocking

    To get into block mode, push Alt-B from the main screen or select it
from the menu and a small box comes up.  Feel free to stretch the block
using the shift+cursor keys and to move it around the screen using the
cursors and the ctrl+cursor keys.  Once you have decided what you want to
fiddle with, push return
    A small menu comes up asking whether you want to copy, move, fill, or
erase this block.  Copying is obvious, it lets you put the same thing
where.    Erasing makes that entire block into the background character and
color.    Move puts it is like a mixture of erase and copy.  It erases the
block and then lets you copy it elsewhere.    Fill will let you change the
foreground and/or background and/or character of the entire block.
    After the menu, move the block to where you want it.  The little
options at the bottom are best explained if you use them, but for you
documentation freaks, Ctrl-S (Smear) puts the block wherever you move,
U (under) will make it go only where the background is, and W (Wrap) will
toggle whether or not you want to to wrap around the edges or just go off
the screen.  Push enter when you're satisfied or escape if you think what
you just did was a boo-boo.

Special effects

    There are right now only a few special effects.  They are ellipse
drawing, rectangles, and painting.    Ellipses (Alt-E) are circles made out
of a character (follow the prompts).  Rectangles (Alt-R) are boxes made out
of the line characters or your own selected.  Painting (Alt-P) lets you
change an odd-shaped area of the screen to have a different color/character.

Animation

    Aah, yes, the strong point of WizDraw.    The animation system is based
upon a large buffer of characters and locations.  When you toggle on the
animation (Ctrl-A), everything which happens is saved in that buffer.  That
includes things from the blocking, rectangles, and everything else which
changes things on the screen.  If you abort from anything, it doesn't get
saved.
    If you want to see what you've got so far, push Alt-V and then enter
what delay you want to have between characters.  This is helpful for when
finding out how slow it will be when going over the modem.
    If you made a mistake and want to quickly delete it, push Alt-Z for
zap and that one will be pushed into oblivion.    This is helpful for when
you're writing stuff on the screen and push the wrong key.
    It is suggested that for most animations which need a lot of things
changed all at once that you turn off the animation (Ctrl-A) and then change
what you need to.  When you toggle it back on, it will ask whether or not
you want it to add the new changes that you made.  This makes animations come
out a lot cleaner.
    What if, however, you decide after you've finished that you don't like
something you've done or you find out you've made a spelling error.  That's
no problem, considering there is now a small animation editing system.
    This editing system shows the animation "frames" one at a time as you
go forward or backward through them by pushing + or -.    When you find one
that you want to change, push C and you will be prompted for the new
character to put in its place.    You can move freely about the screen and can
change the colors while in the animation editor, which can come in handy.
    If you want to skip a whole bunch of frames, push alt-J.  It will prompt
you for which frame you want to skip to.  To insert or delete a frame, push
insert or delete.  Insert will put the new frame BEFORE the one you are
currently on.  Remember that.
    The animation editor is small and unsupported at this time because it
wasn't supposed to be included in WizDraw until 2.0.  However, I got sick
of trashing an animation because of a small mistake which I had made, so I
added in a small one.  Future versions will have block functions in it and
it will have much more support.


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                               Other Stuff
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    A lot of time and energy has gone into WizDraw.  I started working on it
at the beginning of 1991, and this version was released around October.  It
is currently around 5000 lines of code.
    Because I have written it, I'm the only one who knows all the little
quirks and tricks that can be done with WizDraw.  You, too, may some day be
a WizDraw master.  This can only come about, however, if you take the time
to experiment with it quite a bit.    You will be very surprised and
definately pleased at how easy it is to make long and impressive animations
and screens.
    Kevin Francis now sits in front of an old, out-of-date Zenith IBM PieCe.
It's an 8088 with CrapGA.  Kevin is poor.  The only reason that it IS an
8088 is because it was custom-made.  Working off of 2 ten-meg bernoulli
drives, he's spent much time going insane while waiting for his compiler to
run.
    If you enjoy WizDraw or even like it at all, PLEASE, send a donation of
$10-$15.  If you like it a whole bunch and are greatly anticipating the new
version of WizDraw (2.0), send the $20 plus $3 shipping and handling and
you'll be put on the front of a list of people to recieve the newest version.


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                              Future Versions
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    There are many interesting things in store for WizDraw 2.0.  Things such
as shading, extra block functions (mirroring, animating, and such),
canvases (lets you have a picture as a background), line drawing, fonts,
more special effects, more configurability, more file formats, and an improved
and supported animation editor.  Also coming along with it will be EMS support
and possibly VGA support if, by the time it is finished, I can get myself a
new computer.  (Yeah, right)


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                               Registration
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    Right now, you don't NEED to register WizDraw.  1.75 is still Free-Ware.
2.0, however, will be released into the public as Share-Ware.  It will be
a cross between that and Cripple-Ware.    (It will work fully, but it will be
rather annoying to use, count on it.)  All the annoyances will be taken out
for a registered version.
    Because this is only 1.75, however, if you send anything under $20, it
will be considered a donation and you will be sent letters galore because
I make a good pen-pal.    These letters will include news about WizDraw and
possibly disks which have animations and hints/tips on them.
    See the below address for sending in donations/comments/criticisms.
    To register, send $20 plus $3 shipping and handling along with a letter
stating what you think about WizDraw, what you like, what you don't like,
and what you wish it had.

    Kevin Francis
    3479 West 7480 South
    West Jordan, UT  84084