davek@heurikon.UUCP (Dave Klann) (01/05/88)
Here's a (very) brief description of Paint Power.
Paint Power is a drawing program that was written for the UNIXpc. There
is also a version for the 6300 (COLOR). It has all the usual drawing
facilities (box, line, circle, triangle, etc., etc.). You can do cut
and paste from one picture file to another, as well as within a
picture. In TEXT mode Paint Power uses the fonts in /usr/lib/wfont.
With a little digging, I found that I could add or delete available fonts
simply by editing the file .ATTfont (I think) in /usr/lib/ua. The
only restriction is that the font file name has to conform to what
Paint Power is looking for. The text can have attributes including
underline, boldface, and italics, and can be turned on/off on the fly.
Paint Power "thinks" in terms of "regions" on the page. It allows
magnification of a region to allow you to turn single pixels on or off.
It allows you to move or copy a region from one place to another. You
can invert, rotate, or reverse a region too. It also has a
mirror-image mode. When turned on, mirror-image does just that:
makes a mirror image of whatever you are drawing. This is a neat way
to make a lot of things at once (like boxes).
When drawing with Paint Power, you view the page through a "window."
There is a zoom out mode that allows you to view the entire page.
This is my only gripe with Paint Power: you can't (as far as I know)
draw in the zoomed out window. This makes it kludgy to draw something
the full width or length of a page (a border around the the page, for
instance).
Printing with Paint Power is straight forward. Simply press the
<PRINT> key on the UNIXpc keyboard. Paint Power comes with its own
(limited number of) printer drivers. The picture file format is not
documented, nor is the printer driver, so creating a new driver might
not be too easy. The print quality is at least as good as MacPaint,
and better than many PC drawing programs I've seen.
Paint Power is well integrated with the User Agent. It is also very
easy to use from the command line. I usually enter "PaintPower &" and
let it run "in the background." This allows the use of the <RESUME>
key to switch windows between Paint Power, and my shell. Printing
can be done from the shell as well (Paint Power uses lp(1)).
In summary, I think Paint Power is a great drawing tool. I has all
the necessary features, and is quite easy to use. I would recommend
it to anyone who owns UNIXpc and need to turn out some presentation
graphics. Now the hitch: I don't know for sure where it can be
bought. I would think that the dealer/VAR where you bought your PC
should be able to get it. I can probably get the order code if you
want it (e-mail me direct).
David Klann "My opinions are my own (I think)."
{ihnp4|uwvax}!heurikon!davekdave@galaxia.zone1.com (David H. Brierley) (01/07/88)
Regarding where to get PaintPower and various other software packages:
I recently received a catalog from a company called "Technology Resource
Center" which was all about the UNIX-pc. They had complete systems (at
the fire sale prices) and between 50 and a 100 software packages. Everything
from spreadsheets to PaintPower to a full blown relational data base system.
You can even get a COBOL compiler. Most of the software is pretty reasonably
priced, around a couple of hundred dollars, although a few of the packages
got up into the 2000 to 3000 price range. Based on the names of some of the
software packages they look like they might require the DOS-73 board.
Technology Resource Center
5757 Wilshire Blvd Suite M103
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(800) 433-4904
(213) 937-8822
They even have an email system that you can dial into. Call (213) 857-0169
at 300 or 1200 and log in as "guest".
Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with this company other than the fact that
I have a copy of their catalog. I've never even ordered anything from them
so I can't even say anything about the quality of their service.
--
David H. Brierley
Home: dave@galaxia.zone1.com {cbosgd,gatech,necntc,ukma}!rayssd!galaxia!dave
Work: dhb@rayssd.ray.com {cbosgd,gatech,necntc,ukma}!rayssd!dhbal@gtx.com (0732) (01/07/88)
In article <160@heurikon.UUCP> davek@heurikon.UUCP (David Klann) writes: > >Printing with Paint Power is straight forward. Simply press the ><PRINT> key on the UNIXpc keyboard. Paint Power comes with its own >(limited number of) printer drivers. The picture file format is not >documented, nor is the printer driver, so creating a new driver might >not be too easy. The print quality is at least as good as MacPaint, >and better than many PC drawing programs I've seen. > I kludged a setup to work after a fashion with a non-standard printer Y by telling PP that I had a supported printer X and then sending the output through a "Printer-X-to-printer-Y" filter before printing. The difficulty in writing the conversion filter depends on how similar the printers are. In my case, the result had an incorrect aspect ratio, but it was good enough until my laser printer arrived. The thing that bugs me most about PP is the fact that there is no easy way to type a continuous line of text wider than one window (quite a small area when a 300 dpi device is used). As soon as you move the window, it automatically takes you out of text mode, so you have to enter text mode again, and try to line up the new text with the old. This is really aggravating. I bought mine from Amperfax (about $170). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- | Alan Filipski, GTX Corp, 2501 W. Dunlap, Phoenix, Arizona 85021, USA | | {ihnp4,cbosgd,decvax,hplabs,seismo}!sun!sunburn!gtx!al (602)870-1696 | ----------------------------------------------------------------------