SimpleView was written with a number of purposes in mind (which is probably a bad sign): primarily it is a viewer for QuickDraw GX Portable Digital Documents (PDDs). It can also act as a bridge between the worlds of the old QuickDraw and the new QuickDraw GX, by providing basic conversions between their respective graphics formats. It was an exercise in learning about QuickDraw GX graphics, typography and printing. And finally, it was a testbed for my reusable, non-object-oriented, Modula-2 application framework.
Warning: SimpleView is a work in progress—USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. This version has some known problems, and doubtless you will find others. If you hit one, let me know (my contact information is at the end of this document). If SimpleView behaves strangely or crashes, then the more information you can supply about the circumstances that led to the problem, the better the chances of my finding the bug and fixing it.
I also welcome comments and suggestions for improvement. My idea is to release a future version as shareware at some point: what features would you like to see in a utility worth paying for?
SimpleView can open, view and print PDD files, pretty much like Apple’s SimpleText. (Of course, SimpleText does a few other things as well, but never mind.) Unlike versions of SimpleText at least up to 1.1.1, SimpleView tells you how many pages are in the document when you bring up the “Go To Page...” dialog. You can also zoom in to a page for a closer look, or zoom out for an overall view, using the zoom buttons at the bottom-left of each window. Zooming works similarly to the way it does in MacDraw II/Pro: click anywhere in the window, and that point becomes the centre for subsequent zooms.
• Interchange functions
SimpleView lets you copy the entire contents of a page of a PDD to the clipboard, or drag a copy of the page to another application. When you do this, it outputs the data in two formats: one of type “qdgx”, representing the native QuickDraw GX shape data in “flattened” bytestream format, and one of type “PICT”, which is a simple QuickDraw placeholder picture with the flattened QuickDraw GX shape data hidden inside it. The “PICT” data can be imported into non-GX-savvy applications (such as word processors) which will accept QuickDraw pictures without editing them; the pictures won’t look very exciting on-screen, but they will print at the full original quality to any printer for which you have a QuickDraw GX printer driver.
SimpleView can open QuickDraw PICT files, and convert their contents to QuickDraw GX shapes. It can also open GX graphic files containing a single flattened QuickDraw GX shape in their data fork. The type of these files is “qdgx”, and I have enclosed some samples, to show you the kinds of graphics you can create with just a few calls to QuickDraw GX. These samples can also be used to test data interchange with other GX-savvy applications.
• Scripting
If you have AppleScript installed, you will find that SimpleView is scriptable and recordable, and supports the AppleEvent Object Model. Every function that the user can perform, that it makes sense to script, is scriptable. Most of them are recordable, too.
SimpleView’s dictionary only lists its custom AppleEvents: it also supports the required events (except it currently cannot print a file, only the contents of a window), and several of the core events. To find out what these are, just turn on script recording and run through a few actions.
There are also a few extra things you can do via scripting, that I have not (as yet) provided a way to do interactively. You can open a PDD file read/write, whereupon the “Custom Page Setup...” function becomes available, to let you change the formats for individual pages. You can also add and delete pages. Note: this PDD hacking feature is still experimental. I think it’s been the source of a few crashes I’ve had.
Hint for AppleScript/GX hackers: zooming and scrolling is all very well, but for added enjoyment, you can set the “viewport mapping” property of a window to any QuickDraw GX mapping. This property is a blob of type “Mapping”, but SimpleView provides coercions between this type and a simple list of the nine numbers making up the 3*3 matrix, to make it easier to work with.
