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.