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****** Vdraw 1.08 7-Aug-1986 ****** ******** New Stuff (since 1.03) ************* - Can now change the screen resolution via vdraw.profile - 640 wide always - 2, 4, or 8 colours - 200 or 400 lines - Now asks for file names in special input windows - Added a high speed magnifing glass for precise alignment - Added printing modes 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1 - Added poster size printing - Ghosted non-implemented menu items - Command keys for main functions - Fixed bugs in text placement - added 1.2 Kickstart support - New area fill uses MUCH LESS memory - Grid pattern for alignment of objects This is a public domain screen drawing program, you may copy it without guilt but if you use it much, and especially if you want it to improve, please send me $15.00 and I will register you as a user and inform you when new versions become available. My address is: Stephen Vermeulen 3635 Utah Dr., N.W., Calgary, Alberta, CANADA, T2N 4A6 My phone is: (403)-282-7990, best time to call is 16:00 - 23:00. Registered users will also get a photocopy of a more detailled manual when it becomes available. And if you want to receive updates of the program as soon as they become available (and you are a registered user) send me a blank disk and $1.50 and I will mail the update to you as soon as it becomes available. You can include a note as to how much upgrading you wish to see in the new version, for example "wait for a major new feature like 'line'", "wait for a new plotter driver", "when you have done 30 hours of changes", etc. Also if you are a registered user, feel free to send me your comments and suggestions! Vdraw now supports super bit map scrolling of the drawing window. The actual size of the super bit map is defined in the vdraw.profile file that should be located within your S: logical device. To setup the default vdraw.profile type: copy xxx:vdraw.profile s: where xxx: is the name of the device which the vdraw program is on (probably either df0: or df1:). The vdraw.profile file contains the following data: 2.277 704 300 10 10 0 7 -11 50000 200 1 The first number "2.277" is the aspect ratio for your screen, this is used to scale the drawing of circles so that they appear round. To calculate this use the formula: (measured height of the screen) 640 ------------------------------- x ------------------------------ 200 (measured width of the screen) The next two numbers are the width and height of the super bit map to use. If you have a 2Meg Amiga (lucky you!) you can make these as large as 1000 by 750, (maybe even larger), if you are calculating how much memory is going to be used by the super bit map you have three planes rather than the two you might expect because of the TempRas needed by the Flood area filler. The next two numbers are the coordinates of the top left corner of the drawing window on the screen, note because of a bug in Intuition (I think) you cannot drag a superbitmap window around without loosing data from it, because of this I have turned the draging off for this release, I hope version 1.2 of the Kickstart disk fixes this. I have tested vdraw with 1.2 Beta 2 release of kickstart and it appears that this bug has been fixed, so what I have done is given you a flag (the third number on this line) that allows you to disable/enable dragging of the drawing window depending on whether you have 1.1 or 1.2. To disable dragging set this to a zero (0) while to enable dragging set this to one (1). The next two numbers specify the initial size for arrowheads, the second number being negative is a result of the Amiga's reversed Y axis coordinate system. The next number in the file is the time (in microseconds) between refreshes of the lens window. To make the lens window respond more quickly to things you are doing in the main window you reduce this value, to slow the lens' response (and speed up the main program) you increase this number. The maximum value is 999999 and the minimum value is probably around 20000. (The lens is the little untitled window that shows a magnified view (black and white only) of the pixels near the mouse pointer. The last two numbers are the vertical screen resolution to use (either 200 or 400 lines) and the number of bit planes to allocate for colours (1, 2, or 3 bit planes corresponding to 2, 4, or 8 colours). Note: the 704 above is a bit special, you must make sure that whatever number you pick is exactly divisible by 16. ( ie 704 = 16x44 ) How to compute the memory used for bit map data by Vdraw: number of planes * width * height number of bytes = --------------------------------- 8 (Note: for a workbench screen (4 colours) number of planes = 2 and Vdraw 1.06+ has its own area filling routine and thus does not need an extra bit plane for temporary Flood() routine use. Older Vdraws and some commercial drawing programs use an extra plane which wastes memory. ) -------- VDRAW -------- Vdraw is menu driven and easy to use. To start you select a pen colour from the Graphics menu. Then you select a drawing mode from the Draw menu. The drawing modes that now exist are: NOTE: To escape from any function that changes the window's title (ie Sketch, areafill...) just press the menu button. HOLLOWBOX - Draws a series of hollow boxes. Press the menu button to leave this mode. The boxes are drawn in the current line type as selected in the Graphics menu. FILLEDBOX - Draws filled boxes. Uses the currently selected area type to do the fills. Menu button exits. Currently does not draw a border around the rectangle, this may be added in a future release. SKETCH - Sketch lines on the screen while the SELECT button is pressed press the MENU button to exit. LINE DRAW - This routine gives you complete, fine control of drawing single lines. You click on the START / END gadget to select the end point of the line to be moved. You then either click in the main drawing window or click on one of the control window's arrow gadgets to move the selected end point of the line. If you want arrow heads (for dimension lines) you may click on the NONE/ONE/TWO gadget, clicking cycles through the options of no arrow heads, an arrow head on the END point and arrowheads at both ends. The HOLLOW/SOLID gadget is provided for a future release which will allow HOLLOW (as now) or SOLID arrowheads. To change the size/shape of the arrow head, click on the A SIZE gadget then click on the 4 arrow gadgets to return these to their normal functions click on the A SIZE gadget again. When you are satisfied with the appearance of the line press the OK gadget. To finish drawing lines click the CANCEL gadget. CAUTION: it seems that scrolling the superbitmap much while drawing lines can leave junk on the screen, it shouldn't but I suspect a bug in Layers or Intuition, any comments? The above is definintly a bug in 1.1 Kickstart, it has been fixed in 1.2! CIRCLE - This routine allows versatile drawing of circles. With circles you are either adjusting the RADIUS or are locating the CENTER of the circle. Click on the RADIUS and CENTER gadgets to choose which mode you are in. You can use either the arrow gadgets or click directly in the drawing window to adjust either the position or radius length. The MARK gadget controls whether the crosshair mark at the center of the circle is drawn or not. Note: to get round circles on either the screen or the printer you can play around with the aspect ratio (the first number in the vdraw.profile file). Also note that if a circle is round on the screen and you print it with the AUTOSIZED printing option it will be round on the printer as well. ARC-SECTOR -Use this mode to draw circular arcs or pie-pieces (for pie charts). This mode extends the CIRCLE mode by adding several gadgets, the ARC and SECTOR gadgets allow you to switch between these two modes, and the START and END gadgets allow you to adjust the angular sweep of the arc or sector. Again the START and END positions may be adjusted either by clicking in the drawing window or by pressing one of the arrow gadgets. AREAFILL - Move the pointer to the area to be filled and press the select button to fill the area. MENU button exits. Use the Graphics menu to select the fill pattern to be used, currently there are 60 patterns, hence the need for two Area Types entries. The area filling is now done by my own routine, rather than by a call to the graphics library, the reason I did this was that the Flood() command needs an extra bit plane, and that can waste a lot of memory! This routine is slightly slower, but you do get to see it work (so you know the system has not crashed), and can run out of buffer memory (but will not crash if it does so). I would be interested in hearing how much of the fill buffer is actually used (I print a message in the dos window to keep you informed of this). I could also speed up this routine some what by coding a special version of ReadPixel(), but I will have to receive a few requests before I try this... TYPE TEXT - Allows you to enter a string of text, edit it, select the drawing mode (JAM1 ...) and style (bold face ...) to be used and then position the text exactly on the screen. When positioning the text you may either use the arrow gadgets (click once to move one pixel, hold down for automatic repeat) or click directly in the drawing window. When the final version of the text has been drawn the routine will try and do a carriage return line feed to align the next line of text with the left edge of the previous text. Two bugs in moving text have been fixed. The GRAPHICS menu has the following topics: SCREEN - This item has not been implemented yet, eventually I would like to be able to select the graphic resolution that is to be used here and then have the system resize everything to fit. Especially useful would be the ability to get the 400 line interlace mode working from here. Note: at the moment the only way to change the screen resolution is by the values in the vdraw.profile file, but, at least you can now do it. COLOURS - This item allows you to select the current drawing pen colour. If you are drawing (especially area filling!) and do not see anything go on the screen it is probably because you selected the background colour as the pen colour. CHANGE COLOUR - This item which has not been added yet will let you do the RGB mixing of your palate. For the moment, for 2 and 4 colour screens you can use preferences. If anyone has code for a RGB mixer (like in preferences) I could include it in Vdraw, hint, Hint, HINT... LINE TYPES - Currently this item lets you select from 16 different line patterns, I know they are a bit difficult to read as of yet but this is a low priority to change. If you can think of as 16 bit sequence I have missed that would be useful here send it to me. AREA TYPES - Two items here, 1 and 2, because Amiga only supports up to 31 Sub Items for a given Item in a menu list. These are the lifesize predefined area fill patterns. There are probably some good ones that I have missed (if so let me know). I would also like to add some way of user editing these in a future release. There is an EDIT menu, the following functions are supported: MAGNIFY - Draw an enlarged view of a 16x12 pixel region on the screen. To magnify a different area, point at it and press the SELECT button. A small rectangle shows the area that is being magnified. To change a single pixel, point at it in the magnify window and press the SELECT button, each press cycles the pixel's colour by one. To finish magnifing close the magnify window. To scroll the magnified view click on the arrow icons in the Magnify window. CUT - This option allows you to make a copy of a rectangular area in the FREEDRAW WINDOW, the copy appears in the CUT window. The CUT window sizes automatically to accept the cut image. To return to the main menu press the MENU button. PASTE - This option allows you to paste the contents of the CUT window anywhere in the FREEDRAW window. There are four modes in which you can do the actual pasting. When you are done press the MENU button. The two most useful modes are overlay (which erases the area underneath the patch being pasted) and OR which does a logical OR of the two areas. The MERGE does an exclusive or of the areas and the seive is really wierd! INVERSE - This routine inverts the colours in the selected area. Press the MENU button to exit. ERASE - This routine lets you either erase the entire drawing surface or enter a special erase box mode which allows you to specify (by rubber banding a box) a series of rectangular areas on the drawing surface to be erased. MOVE - This routine lets you box an area on the screen, cut it out (erasing the area where it was) and move it somewhere else. The mode which is used to paste down the final copy is one of the four modes that the PASTE function supports, the normal mode to use is "OR". GRID - This menu topic has three subitems, ON, OFF, and PITCH. Selecting ON will turn the background alignment grid pattern on. Selecting OFF turns it off. And selecting PITCH will pop up a window asking you to type in a pitch to be used. When this window appears, click on the string requester, and type in your desired pitch as two integer numbers separated by a space, for example: "50 50". Then, either hit return or click on the OK gadget. The OPPS menu allows you to select system type operations, these are relatively bug free, however they are very new. You can print either the entire drawing surface (PRINT ALL) or just what is displayed on the window (PRINT WINDOW). Either printing may be done as a one to one pixel dump (in which case the circles get squished) or as a autosized remapping in which case the aspect ratios stay correct. Due to a request from one of the registered users I have added 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, and 5:1 options to these printing functions, these will double (or tripple, or quadruple...) the size of the pixels on the printer, and they break up the printing into n*n pieces of paper, so that very large posters (40 by 50 inches) can be produced. To make this work the best you should set the size of the super bit map (in vdraw.profile remember?) so that your printer does its automatic perforation skip at the end of a 1:1 bitmap dump. On my Roland PR-1011 (Epson printer driver) I set the super bit map to be 960 pixels wide by 720 lines high, this exactly fills a full page on the printer, thus the 4:1 option gives you a poster made of 16 complete 8.5x11 sheets of paper! Finally you can save your drawing with SAVE FILE or load a previous effort with LOAD FILE. There are two submenu topics for these: VDRAW and IFF, select the VDRAW option to load/save the file is Vdraw bitmap format, the IFF option is provided for a future release where it will allow loading/saving of files in the IFF format. These routines do not use the IFF format, this is because I do not have enough documentation or examples to figure it out yet (maybe version 1.2?). Finally I have added an audit file option. The purpose behind this is to generate a file of ascii commands that could be used to drive a plotter or laser printer to create very high quality output. Since the audit file is a completely ascii format it can be edited with any text editor, easily transmitted by modem and it might even take less space than a bit map. There are four submenu topics for the AUDIT topic. The first is ON which is used to open a file for recording commands, it will ask you for a file name in a special window. If you plan on using the SKETCH draw mode I would recomend you specify that the audit file is on the ram disk! If you only have a single drive system and you want to use several fonts you MUST put the audit file on the ram disk because the system can get confused when trying to load a font and the audit file is open! The OFF sub menu topic is used to close the audit file. You could then open another audit file to record a new drawing without leaving Vdraw. The PLAYBACK topic is used to play an existing audit file back into Vdraw, it will ask for the file name in a special window. With this feature is is possible to edit a drawing by using a text editor to edit an audit file and then PLAYBACK the edited audit file. The last submenu topic is the MACRO feature which allows one to replay an audit file relative to the mouse pointer's position (like the way the PASTE option works), this feature can be used to create a "parts" library. To use it select the MACRO topic, then enter the file name to be replayed in the special window next click in the main drawing window (the first click is wasted currently to get the mouse propperly in position) next, click wherever you wish a copy of the part to be drawn. When you are done press the menu button to leave this mode. The LOADCUT and SAVECUT routines have not yet been implemented, these will allow the loading and saving of the cut window in iff file format. The QUIT option is the way out of the program. The FONTS menu allows you to select the font to be used in subsequent text commands. This menu is not fixed, instead it is dynamically built when the program is run so that all the fonts currently in the system are supported. Currently a maximum of 100 combinations of font and point size are supported, this will probably be rewritten in a future release. The CREDITS menu prints the author credits. The author of Freedraw 0.01 gets credit here because the very original version of this was based on Freedraw 0.01, over time the old code has been transformed beyond recognition and now, statistically may account for up to 0.3% of the source code, if it can be recognized! PLOTTER drivers: Support for Hewlett Packard XY plotters has been added in the form of a special file conversion utility that converts from Vdraw audit file commands to Hewlett Packard's HPGL language. It also appears that the Roland plotters may use this command language, but I have not personally tested this. It appears that there are at least 3 versions of HPGL in existance I have used the very earliest two in the writing of the driver. The first version supports line drawing and text, the second version adds commands to draw circles and arcs, and the third version supports some area filling (of circles, sectors, and rectangles). As each new version of HPGL includes all the commands of the previous version the driver will work on any plotter with any version of HPGL. The steps to produce a Vdraw drawing on an HPGL plotter are as follows: 1 - Start Vdraw, open an audit file 2 - Draw your drawing, keep in mind that the plotter driver cannot handle such things as paste, erase, magnify ... The driver only has one font, but it does have a variable height and supports underlining, bold facing, extended width, and italics. 3 - When you have finished drawing close the audit file and leave Vdraw. 4 - Now you will need to use the "hpout" program to convert the audit file commands to an HPGL file. To use this program you need one more file which contains information about the plotter you are using an example of this file called "guide" is located in the "plotters" directory along with the "hpout" program. The "guide" file contains the following information: 10 0.035 500 500 7220 the first line specifies the magnifing factor to convert from Vdraw coordinates to plotter coordinates (this may be a real number, ie. you could use something like 5.26), you use this number to set the final size of the drawing. The second line contains the magnifing factor for text. The third line contains the global paper offsets in plotter coordinates, you can use these numbers to shift the plot around on the page (no decimals are allowed here). The fourth number contains the plotter's model number, this is used by the driver to find out what version of HPGL the plotter understands. Do not include any letters on this line, that is specify 7220 even if you have a plotter HP calls a 7220T. The only two models that are accepted at the moment are the 7220 and the 7475, both of these will use level two of HPGL, if you want to use the very primative level of HPGL specify a 9872 plotter. As I did not have full documentation on the 7475 I was not able to make use of its additional area filling commands at this point in time. 5 - To use the hpout program, call it from CLI by "hpout", this way the the program will remind you that the actual syntax to use is: hpout guide auditfile hpglfile and will cause the program "hpout" to read the plotter information file called "guide" and use that information to help convert the file "auditfile" containing the Vdraw drawing audit commands into a file called "hpglfile" containing the drawing in HPGL format. NOTE: any audit commands (such as FILL, CUT, PASTE ...) that the plotter cannot handle will be ignored by the hpout program and will not appear in the hpglfile. 6 - Finally, (about time you say?) you can draw the drawing on your plotter by copying it to the appropriate port (either PAR: or SER:) that is: copy hpglfile PAR: or copy hpglfile SER: I would not try to use PRT: because there is a chance that the special reformating that the Amiga's printer driver does might interfere with the format of the HPGL plotter commands. 7 - If you need to modify the program "hpout" to support other plotters (or even laser printers) the source code is provided in "hpout.c", if you do this please send me the modified source code so that I can redistribute it. Stephen Vermeulen 7-Aug-1986. UPCOMING ideas: - saving/loading of the drawing in IFF.H format - drafting aids, more area fill patterns. - perhaps a CHARTS menu for doing canned graphs, like bar graphs and pie charts... ideas?? - a SCREEN menu to allow you to use a variety of graphics resolutions, 640x400, 320x200x32 etc. - a COLOUR PALATE window to allow you to change the colours. - more plotter drivers that would take an audit file as input and create an output file suitable for driving various plotting devices such as laser printers and XY plotters. - faster moving routine. - spray painting, brushing... - drop me a line if you have any requests. - Wanted: source code I can add to Vdraw for an RGB colour mixer and examples of reading/writing the IFF files! (Must be fully public domain!)