Difference between revisions of "Draw utility"

Revision as of 17:37, 26 January 2019

Draw Utility is a type-in art program from the 5 January 1985 issue of Personal Computing News (UK). The program is part drawing tool, part graphic loading tool; with the latter being re-useable in other software. The application is therefore able to be used to produce graphics in BASIC games and other software; at the user's discretion.

Controls

The cursor, which defines where lines, etc both start and end, is controlled with the arrow keys. The program has a number of features, each accessed via a single keypress.

• P - Select a Picture (from 0 to 9)
• D - Draw the selected picture on screen
• F - Finish the selected picture and move on to the next
• L - Set the starting point for drawing a line or arc
• E - Set the end point for the line or arc and draw it
• R - Set the first corner for drawing a rectangle
• M - Set the opposite corner for drawing a rectangle, then draw it as a filled rectangle
• I - Partial infill (see below)
• T1 - Mark the first point of a triangle
• T2 - Mark the second point of a triangle
• T3 - Mark the third point of a triangle, then draw it
• Z - Clear the screen
• K - Re-draw the previous picture number, starting at the current cursor position
• X - Delete the last command (clear the screen and re-draw using D to see the effect)
• B - Set the border colour
• C - Change the ink colour
• G - Display the cursor co-ordinates
• U - Display the length of the picture buffer space that has been used so far
• K - Save/Load picture buffer

The Partial Infill Function

Infilling does not work the same way as a modern art package's 'bucket fill' tool would. Instead this function will draw a curve from the current cursor position back to the last position set as the starting position using the line tool. This allows very accurate in-filling, but can be confusing on first use.

Download

• Download the program (DSK format)