ac@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu (Mark Acfield) (01/19/88)
As mentioned previously, CoCo Artist works with objects and maintains
each separately rather than losing track of them once they are "installed"
in the bit image of the screen. This can be very useful in that temporary
boxes and lines may be put into an image to help in aligning the subsequent
items and then removed when the drawing is completed.
Although CoCo Artist has few drawing tools, they correspond directly to
the drawing codes available on OS9 LII windows. Furthermore, CoCo Artist
can dump out a finished drawing in the form of OS9 LII window display codes.
The drawing can then be displayed by merging the output to the window. Or
an application you are writing can read them in and echo them to a window to
get the same effect. Conceivably one could write a small program to convert
these codes into DATA statements for BASIC09 or FCB's for assembler. I was
initially disappointed with CoCo Artist, but when I started to think of it
as a tool to design window graphics it became much more interesting.
One final idea occurred to me. Even at the highest CoCo resolution, the
results look pretty chunky when sent to a printer. If you have access to
a 300 dpi printer that supports some graphic language such as postscript,
it may be possible to take the output of CoCo Artist and convert it to that
language. Take a simple diagonal line for example. If you send the bit
image to the printer it will look quite staircase like. CoCo Artist,
on the other hand, will output this as the window code to generate a line.
Convert this to postscript and you will have a beautiful line. The endpoints
of the line will still be restricted by the CoCo resolution but the
intermediate points can take advantage of the printers higher resolution!
--
Name: Mark Acfield (University of Toronto Computing Services)
Path: ac@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu
{utzoo,ihnp4}!utgpu!ac
Alias: ac@utorgpu.bitnet