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WimpExt
WimpExt is a module which is copyright Jon Ribbens, and is distributed with this application in terms of his distribution statement.
Disclaimer
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No guarantee is stated or implied that this program is suitable for any purpose whatsoever. No responsibility will be accepted by the author for any damages of any nature whatsoever sustained by any person, creature, thing, legal person, organisation, or body singular or corporate of any description, whether direct or indirect, resulting from the use or non-use or misuse or inability to use this program.
To produce a neatly printed catalogue of a collection of drawfiles with minimum human intervention.
How it got to this point
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Skip this section if you're not into blurb.
I have a collection of about 30-odd megs of clipart in Drawfile format, numbering in excess of 2400 items.
I have forgotten most of what I've got, but the collection grows apace. It is too painful to try to look through the collection on the screen, and some kind of printed catalogue was needed. It's much easier to flip through a book of pictures, scanning the pages quickly, than to wade through each one in !Draw(Plus), Arm2million notwithstanding.
Of course the catalogue would have to include some method of mapping the picture in the book to the location of the file on the hard drive. So each picture in the book would have to have a pathname & filename attached to it.
I started making a kind of a catalogue by manually dragging the files into a Draw window, scaling each one to more or less a suitable size, and then typing the filename below it. Each page had the full pathname of the directory of origin at the top. When I had done three pages, I decided that this was secretary-type work.
My secretary resigned after five pages, and I'm still dealing with some rather nasty correspondence from her union, her lawyer, and the maintenance department of a hospital for nervous disorders. Property values in the vicinity of that hospital have plummeted, as the night is still split by a series of banshee-like screeches when someone inadvertently says the word "draw".
Clearly some form of automation was needed.
I was faced with the massively daunting prospects of coming to grips with the Draw module and the Draw file format, the Font Manager, and the Printer Driver, all in one go (I had the Wimp pretty much under control, although I still bear the scars of *that* learning curve).
I tried quite unashamedly to palm the project off onto such leading lights as Jonathan Marten and Jon Ribbens, but they very courteously and gently told me that they would not consider it at this time. So I had to do it. The election period produced two unexpected holidays in the middle of the week, and instead of queueing up with everybody else, I banged away at my Arc (I dashed off at the last minute to vote). The weekend weather was not conducive to the beach, so I had another two days. Two more nights finally did it, and voila! It works! Version 0.01 was the first working version, and version 1.00 is the first
Startup
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Double-click on the Filer icon to install !DrawCat on the iconbar.
Now you can do one of three things:
1 Create a new catalogue
2 View an existing catalogue
3 Print an existing catalogue
Creating a catalogue
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Drag the directory containing your drawfiles onto the iconbar icon. A comfort window opens showing progress. After a brief spell, the activity on your disc drive should stop, and the comfort window will close. That's it.
You can only create one catalogue at a time, and it lives in !DrawCat's application directory. There's nothing stopping you from getting at it and renaming or relocating it, but if you want to view or print it, it's gotta be called "DrawCat" nad it's gotta be in !DrawCat's application directory.
If you already have a catalogue loaded, it will be discarded by this process.
Any catalogue previously created will be overwritten by this process. You can therefore manage only one catalogue at a time.
Viewing the catalogue
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Click MENU on the iconbar icon, and click "Load file". A little disc activity should take place, as the application loads up the first pageful of drawfiles, and while this is happening, a comfort window opens showing progress.
When the first pageful is loaded, a little control window ("Pages") will open somewhere above the Task Manager icon, which will duplicate some of the iconbar icon menu functions.
Now click MENU over the iconbar icon, and click on "Show page". The current page of drawfiles will be rendered on the screen.
If the page control window is closed, click on "Pages..." on the iconbar icon menu.
Click on the "Show page" icon in the "Pages" control window, and the current page of drawfiles will be rendered on the screen as above.
At the top of the page will appear the full pathname of the directory which contains the files on that page, with the leafname of each file printed below each picture. Pictures are scaled to fit into a box which has the same aspect ratio as a standard piece of paper (X:Y = 1:€2), with a 1/20" internal offset, so that the picture's edges are not obliterated by the box's lines.
If the directory contains fewer files than necessary to fully tile a page, the remaining space on that page is left blank. If there are more files than necessary to fully tile a page, then the first page will be full, and there will be others to follow containing the rest, and so on until all the files in that directory have been accounted for.
To view the next page, click "Next page" on the iconbar icon menu, or click the ">" icon in the Pages control window.
You can go back a page by clicking the "<" icon in the control window.
You can return to the start either by clicking "|<" in the control window, or by clicking "Page one" in the iconbar icon menu.
Rendition of tiles is top down, right to left.
Printing the catalogue
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If you have not loaded a catalogue yet, then do so (see above). Click MENU over the iconbar icon, and click on "Print". A printer control window will appear, showing he name of your printer driver (if loaded) or a message telling you to run !Printers if you haven't Printing starts from the current page.
If you have been viewing a catalogue, and are not on page one, then go to page one (see iconbar icon menu).
Now click on the "Print" icon in the printer window, and go and have several cups of coffee.
Depending on how many files you have, and how many tiles there are per page, it can take quite a long time to print the catalogue. I think that on my printer (DeskJet 500), putting more tiles on a page will speed it up a bit, as the printer is slower than the ARM3 at rendering drawfiles.
If my printer does one page in a minute and a half, and if every directory and subdirectory contains an exact multiple of 25 files, then my 2400 files will occupy 96 pages, and will take about 2½ hours to print out.
Customising
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Tiling starts out as 5×5 by default, but is user-selectable.
Click MENU over the iconbar or click "Tiling...". A window will open with tiling options from 2 to 10 (i.e., 2×2 to 10×10). It is my seriously considered opinion that a tiling of 1×1 is not compatible with currently accepted international scientific norms of sanity, and more than 10×10 would be difficult to use in practice. If there is an overwhelming demand for a writeable icon in this area, for tilings not catered for, then I just *might* consider it.
Fonts start out as Homerton.Medium.Italic 14pt for the heading (i.e., the name of the directory), and Homerton.Medium 12pt for the leafnames. This is also user-selectable.
Click MENU over the iconbar icon and click "Fonts...". A window will appear showing the above default values. Click SELECT over the 'menu' icon buttons and select your font from there. Type in point sizes. Click "OK" to set these values and close the window. If the catalogue display window is open at that time, it will be updated. Don't select System font -- I haven't catered for it. Program will crash.
Custom settings cannot be saved. Once again, if there is an overwhelming demand for settings to be saveable, then I just *might* consider it.
Miscellaneous points
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Clicking "Reset" on the iconbar icon menu will zero and clear everything -- as if you had just run !DrawCat.
Clicking "Textfile" on the iconbar icon menu will load the DrawCat catalogue file into !Edit (or whatever text editor is your flavour of the month). This is more a curiosity than greatly useful.
Clicking over a picture tile in the main window will load that drawfile into !Draw or whatever vector graphics application your system currently recognises. This enables you to make changes, such as are related to the early-version DrawPlus problems described below ("Note:..."). Saving the altered drawfile does not immediately update the window, as it should in a true OLE environment, because the original file is still held in memory. Click on "Update" on the ibi menu, and the files will be reloaded, and your changes will be shown.
Note: it seems that an earlier version of !DrawPlus (I think) may have saved the bounding box of drawfiles incorrectly. This may also be the case when converting drawfiles from other machines.
The result is that, where this has happened, the pictures are either incorrectly placed within the little boxes, or are partly or wholly outside them, or are the wrong size. This may be discovered by viewing the pages, but it's probably easier to print them all out and then browse through at you leisure. You can always reprint those pages later on.
To fix this problem, get the latest version of !DrawPlus (I have version 2.24), load the offending file and resave it (press <F3> and <return>). Close the !DrawPlus window, and repeat the process for all the incorrect files.
A few things need possible later attention.
Files are aligned left-bottom within their boxes -- it would probably be cosmetic to have them centred.
Only one catalogue can be loaded at one time.
The catalogue information is stored as a textfile inside the !DrawCat application directory. There is no built-in option to create multiple different catalogues and store them where you wish. You can do this manually, though. The catalogue to be used must reside within !DrawCat's directory, and must be called "DrawCat".
If a directory's contents change, then drag just that directory down to the icon, to create a new mini-catalogue, and print that. Of course, you can edit the catalogue, as it is simply a list of full path-names. You can thus create it by hand quite easily by SHIFT-dragging the files to an !Edit window. This causes the full pathname of the file to appear in !Edit's window. In this manner files from all over the place could be used to create a customised catalogue. Just remember to separate each directory with a blank line. !DrawCat uses these blank lines to know where one directory ends and the next one begins.
The catalogue reader is quite robust. If you have inadvertently included a directory name in your catalogue, then it will be ignored. Any file which is not a drawfile will also be ignored. You can therefore quite happily shift-drag the entire contents of a directory to !Edit's window, secure in the knowledge thar !DrawCat will pick out only the drawfiles. These situations do not arise when !DrawCat creates its own catalogues. Word of warning: keep <shift> pressed until *all* the files have been accepted by !Edit.
There is a blank border all around each page such that the printed part is 85% of an A4 page's surface area. This is to take cognisance of the fact that laser/jet printers cannot print over the whole surface of an A4 page. A future version should read the printer driver's page size, and adjust the printable dimensions to fit that. It's not difficult -- I just haven't got round to it.
The program uses 96K of memory, plus it uses the heap as implemented by Jon Ribbens in his excellent WimpExtension module to load all the drawfiles, and this heap starts at HIMEM and grows upwards from there.
Beware all ye with smaller RAMs. Loading many drawfiles may exhaust your memory. I wanted originally to load only one row of drawfiles at a time, to save on memory. It is possible to do this with the printer driver module, but it takes more time than it is worth for me to actually program this in.
The program can deal with only path and text objects. It can also deal with grouped path and text objects. It cannot deal with sprites, etc. When dealing with path objects, it provides a complete rendition as implemented in !Draw(Plus). It cannot render transformed (i.e., rotated) text objects. That is because I do not have the RO3 PRMs. I'll be getting a RiscPC in a couple of days, and hopefully the PRMs will follow soon. A future version may also be able to render sprites too. Don't hold your breath.
Note that when rendering System font text objects that the positioning may not be 100% correct. VDU 23,17,7... does not seem to be able to cope with very accurate scaling, and it seems that some rounding errors occur. This seems to become more apparent when rendering to printer.
WimpExtension
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This is an incredibly useful module, by Jon Ribbens, and I cannot praise it too highly. It provides a whole bunch of Wimp-related SWIs, and takes much of the drudgery out of Wimp programming. Get it if you can (the full version, which includes the manual).
Me
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If you have any ideas, comments, etc., I would be delighted to hear from you.
