pugh@cornell.UUCP (William Pugh) (01/08/87)
mini Review of Cricket Draw
Cricket Draw is a new drawing package by Cricket software that
is similar to concept to drawing packages such as MacDraw, but is
designed for PostScript printers, and allows you to perform many
operations that can not be done in Quickdraw, such as rotating text
and creating grey scales from 0-100% in 1% increments.
CricketDraw is NOT copy-protected.
The program is similar to MacDraw, so I'll briefly describe the
differences between it and MacDraw
In addition to the drawing primitives in MacDraw, you also get
diamonds, grates, and starbursts. A grate is a set of parallel lines
or concentric circles. You can specify the number of lines, and for
non-circular grates, if they are to be spaced on a linear or log scale.
Starbursts are a series of rays radiating from a center point. You choose
the starting angle, the ending angle, and the increment between rays.
For all lines, including border and the components of grates and starbursts,
you can choose width, grey scale and style (solid or one of several dashed
styles). All closed objects can be filled with a grey scale.
You can create a text box that will contain text. You can select
a grey scale for the entire box, and within the box, you can have multiple
fonts, sizes and styles.
All objects can be rotated and tilted.
Special effects
FOUNTAINS - Closed objects can be filled with a fountain. A fountain is
a smooth shading from one grey scale to another. A fountain can either be
radial (e.g. white in the center, fading to black at the outer edge), or
directional (i.e. the grey scale changes from left or right, top to bottom,
or at any angle you want). Direction fountains can change on either a linear
or log scale.
SHADOWING - Any object, including text, can be shadowed. A shadow can
extend at any angle and length from an object, and you can specify the grey
scale at the front and rear of the shadow, and the grey scale for the rear
border.
TEXT ALONG A PATH - Given a smoothed or unsmoothed polygon, open or
closed, you can has the system layout a line of text along that path. This
effect can not be simulated on screen, while almost all other effects can be.
Copying images to other applications
They do some neat stuff with PICTs and PICT comments, so that you
can cut part of an image out, and paste it into any other application. The
application will only see an approximation of the image (the best Quickdraw
can do) when it writes it to the screen, put when it is printed on a
PostScript device, the image will be printed in full detail.
PostScript Editor
The system also contains a PostScript editor. The editor consists of
a simple text editor, facilities for downloading PostScript, and an
interactive PostScript help facility. You can also request that it generate
the PostScript for one of the open CricketDraw documents, and let you look
at it and modify it. You can then download or save the PostScript, but
there is no way of converting modified PostScript back into a CricketDraw
document.
Problems
The system still has a few problems, most of which they should be able
to fix soon. The system is buggy - for example, if a print error is received
from the LaserWriter, it hangs the system. When scrolling, it seems to
be spending time redrawing stuff that is off screen, which can take a while.
I had poor luck the one time I've gotten a chance to actually print something
on a LaserWriter Plus - I attempted to print out the sample document included
on the disk and discussed in the manual, and gave up after waiting over a half
hour for the LaserWriter to finish. This may have been because the previous
document I had printed was a auto-downloaded laser font, and the LaserWriter
may not have purged it from it's memory. Even if this was the problem, I think
it is still the case that excessive use of the fancy features of CricketDraw
will produce documents that require a close approximations of forever to print.
CricketDraw Notes
Cricket software provides a service for $25 a year which provides you
with monthy collections of notes and errata for CricketDraw.
Availability
CricketDraw is published by Cricket software, (215)-387-7955. The list
price of CricketDraw is $295, street price seems to be $230-$175 (I've only
heard rumors of prices as low as $175). They started shipping around the
beginning of the year, and I hold one in hands now, so it's not vaporware.
Disclaimer - I have nothing to do with Cricket software,.... (and all
the usual stuff)
Bill Pugh
Cornell University
..{uw-beaver|vax135}!cornell!pugh
607-255-4934/257-6994
--
Bill Pugh
Cornell University
..{uw-beaver|vax135}!cornell!pugh
607-255-4934/257-6994