¢PD SOFTWARE SCENE¢¢¢DRAW7 (XE) V2.0¢¢Reviewed by Alan Hitchen, 1997.¢¢¢ At first glance you might think that this was just another simple art package for the 130XE, but you would be wrong. In fact it could be argued that this utility is too complicated for its own good. To give you some idea of how complicated it is I can tell you that the program package has five documentation files containing over eleven thousand words of instruction, and the help screen that just details the commands available has eight pages.¢¢ After loading, the program gives you the opportunity to read the documentation, or command list, before presenting you with a blank Graphics 15 screen and flashing cursor. It is a four colour program with 256 colours available from its pallette. Your own choice of colours can be memorised and restored if changed.¢¢ Drawing is assisted by point, line, rubberband line, dotted line, wide line and ray commands. Also available are boxes, circles and ellipses in solid or outline form. Fill, inverse or undo the last change, even undo the undo, erase the whole screen or just the current draw colour. Cursor size and speed can be adjusted. Text can be written in six sizes using any nine sector font, which can be inversed, multicoloured or in 3D.¢¢ The whole picture can be moved up, down, left or right, with a wraparound effect. The picture can be flipped left to right (ideal for an iron on image) or upside down. Picture halves or quarters can be mirrored or duplicated horizontally or vertically. Halves can also be inverted.¢¢ Zoom mode can be enabled to work on a selected 1/32 area of the screen, or a zoom area can be duplicated to fill a whole screen. Zoom screens can be saved as a two sector Graphics 3 file for later use.¢¢ Perhaps the most unusual part of this package is the record facility. A large part of the documentation is given to explaining its capabilites. As your picture is being created you can record your actions and replay them. Or save it to disk, and replay it later. The recordings may be edited and added to, within memory limits. They can be replayed singly or chained together to create a slide show of the artist at work.¢¢ Pictures are saved as a standard 62 sector file, or as a horizontally compressed, Micro Illustrator format file. The pictures may be printed out directly from this program, but only if you have a C.Itoh Prowriter 8510. Other picture files in Graphics 8, 9, 10 and 11 can be loaded and viewed, but these can not be worked on.¢¢ Control is by Joystick, console keys and keyboard commands. This is a program with a lot of facilities, and so needs a lot of commands to control them. This requires the user to either have a good memory, or constantly refer to the command list, which I found to be irritating. Having said that I can't find much else to criticise, apart from a lack of an airbrush, why not give it a try and see what you think?¢¢ A sample picture, zoom screen, font and several playback files are included in the package.¢
