This program is for programmers who like to use 2D vector graphics in their programs. Generally such programmers have two main alternative ways to produce their pictures:
The DrawBustV2 program aims to implement the second method. It provides simple tools for drawing straight lines, circles, rectangles and other polygons on screen; polygons can be filled with colour if wished. Drawings can be saved to disk as (drb) files for later reloading and editng. Finally, (and the ultimate objective of the program), the drawing information for a drawing can be exported to disk in any one of three ways:
Your application programs can use whichever of these three possible export formats suits best to implement screen-displayed pictures and even simple animations. You will need some general skill and experience in programming for graphic display to write your application. Two programs demonstrating use of pictures produced by DrawBust are provided, along with their Euphoria source code, to get you pointed in the right direction.
I can't give you a tutorial on graphics' programming. If you are new to the subject I can recommend two good (if old) books on the subject:
"Computer Graphics", John Lansdown; Hodder & Stoughton (1987).
"Computer Graphics", Hearn, D & Baker M P Prentice Hall International (1986).
These books are quite general, and don't presuppose any particular computer graphics' system.
In the DrawBust program a drawing object consists of items (aka elements, seqments, components). A drawing object composed of n items can be thought of as having the form:
{item[1],item[2], ...., item[n]}
I have had a lot of enjoyment writing this program, as
I hope you will have using it. I owe a lot to other
people (SEE Credits) for the fact
that the program exists at all. Such faults as are in the
program are entirely my own. This is the first public
release of the program, and over time I hope to add
upgrades and improvements to it. All suggestions to
this end are welcome.
Licence
The program is supplied subject to a licence. Please click here to read the licence.
The DrawBustV2 program is supplied in a folder inside a zip file. To install the program just unzip it to a location of choice on your computer. Installation makes no changes to your computer's settings.
To run the program, open the new folder and click on the DrawBustV2.exe executable file.
Detailed help with using the program is available in the program's help option as well as in the file Help.html.
The trial version of the program is fully functional, but without activation it will cease to run after 30 days from the date you first use the program. To activate the program you need to obtain an Activation Number, as follows:
Mail (yes, mail!) to me the equivalent of US$20, in any convenient currency, at the following address:
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Make sure you include your name, your address (postal and/or email) in your letter.
On receipt of your donation I will send an email to you containing the Activation Number. If you have no email address, I will mail the Activation Number to you at your given postal address. To activate, run the DrawBustV2 program and activate it in the way described in the program's Help file.
The program comes with two programs to demonstrate programmed use of data exported from DrawBustV2.
The simplest of these demonstrations is a minimal program that draws a simple picture of a sailboat on the screen. It illustrates the minimal steps which any program would have to take to produce a screen rendering of a vector drawing. Although written in Euphoria, most programmers should be able to twig what is going on by reading the source code in the folder SourceCode inside the folder SailboatDemo.
The second of these programs, also in Euphoria (again full source code supplied) is intended to illustrate the potential of vector drawing. It uses pictures exported as text from DrawBustV2 to create an animated scene in which the drawn objects move in various ways. The scaling in this program is looked after by a graphic scaling library ScaleW.ew while the motion of the objects is looked after by some OOP instances created under the EuCanOOP.e OOP library.
I am indebted to the following for features incorporated in this program:
To RapidEuphoria.com for Euphoria, a programming language which is elegant in style and pleasing to use.
To Andrea Cini, for her EuWinGUI Library which provides access to the Windows API in a simplified form which even idiots like me can understand. Library available from RapidEuphoria.com.
To C.A. Newbould for his EuCanOOP.e OOP Library. I have used this library to create some classes and methods for moving 2D graphic objects around the screen. By using it, the program Sailboat.exe becomes little more than a lot of instructions for creating the moving objects, and then displaying them; the objects more or less look after their individual styles of moving on the screen. Also available at RapidEuphoria.com.
To J Reumuth for the LiteEdit program which I now use by choice for much of my program writing. Even I could set it up properly.
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