mls@dasys1.uucp (Michael Siemon) (04/10/90)
In article <1832@ambush.dk> andrew@ambush.dk (Leif Andrew Rump) writes: >Do you know anything about a wordprocessing/draw/paint program called >Picasso? I already answered Leif in email, but thought I might say something more publicly. Picasso has as its central core a generalization of Kernighan's troff preprocessor pic(1). It's output is, however, PostScript rather than troff, and the attributes of objects include color and fill, lineweight, arc radius for boxes and polylines and other such like generalizations. It also admits general 2D affine transformations. On top of this "batch" kernel (which can be used to replace pic in standard UNIX text-processing pipelines) there is an Open Look interactive interface that is a more or less full function "object oriented" drawing program. (Sorry, there are no pixmap capabilites, at least at this intial stage; it is MacDraw rather than MacPaint.) The Open Look interface does not yet give total access to the underlying pic-like language (macros and expressions are only available by editing "picture" file output, rather than directly in the Open Look interface; other features will be added to picasso on the basis of user feedback in future releases.) Picasso is currently in beta testing (it was shown at Uniforum) and will be (I think -- this is not something I am in close touch with) available as a part of the Documenter's Workbench suite of programs (i.e., troff etc.) in a month or two at most. Binary versions of the picasso beta (for 386-based machines) have been included with the XWIN/OpenLook source tapes from USO starting this last January (i.e. with the UNIX SV4.0 versions of OpenLook.) I will be happy to field any inquiries and direct them to the right place. (I built the pic-language generalization and kibitzed on the design of the Open Look interface; obviously I am biased, but since most of the Open Look interface is the work of Manijeh Shayegan and Chi Choy, it may be worth my reporting that I find the program useable. :-)) Please note that I am speaking here *entirely* on my own, and not as any sort of spokesman for AT&T, USO or whatever. -- Michael L. Siemon We must know the truth, and we must mls@dasys1 love the truth we know, and we must act m.siemon@ATT.COM according to the measure of our love. -- Thomas Merton