PencilTWO is a vector-oriented drawing program. Its most remarkable feature is flexibility: New drawing methods can be added to it in the form of postscript language procedures (even at run-time) and it has a built-in TCL interpreter, with which you can write macros and change UI features. There are polygons, curves (Hermite, Bezier and Catmull-Rom), circles, arcs, rectangles, character paths, "Rich Text" and so on. You can rotate, scale, group, clip, copy, paste, reorder and move graphics. There are several fill types (including gradient fill) and stroke types (including "neon light" gradient stroke). You can add shadows and other effects to a graphic object. You can copy objects or the whole view as postscript to the pasteboard. You can scroll around and zoom into the document. There is even a basic freehand tool for drawing polygons.
PencilTWO may be distributed under the GNU General Public License. Its built-in TCL interpreter is under a separate license. (Start PencilTWO and select "Copyright" in the Help Panel)
RELEASE NOTES:
PencilTWO has the following new features:
- Built-in tcl interpreter (about 50 Pencil-related tcl commands + "object-oriented" tcl interface to some of NEXTSTEP's GUI classes)
- 128 Layers
- A "palette" window that contains graphic objects which can be dragged&dropped into the document
- An "attributes" window with easy access to your predefined graphic attributes
- "Blending" between two objects
- Transparency (!) (limited, but it will print - no compositing)
- Scrolling through scrollbars
- NEXTSTEP Help panel
- A "Shapes" panel with icons for the path method types
- New "Catmull-Rom"-curve type
- Bugs in treatment of tiff/eps-images fixed (at least for images which are not rotated: I use compositing now. For rotated images I still use the old hack...)
- A full 2x3 transformation matrix is now stored with every object, eliminating a bug with scaling differently in x/y directions. Now you can shear objects, too.
- PageLayout panel supported
I have changed/discarded/added some PostScript procedures. So you will have to convert Pencil1.0-files (however, there is a possibility to view/change them without conversion).
To compile the source code, you will need the tcl7.3 distribution, which is available from a lot of ftp servers.
Thanks to Ralf Suckow for the bezier curves code.
You can reach me at
a0047@freenet.uni-bayreuth.de
Florian Marquardt
(86736 Dornstadt-Auhausen, Bavaria, Germany, Europe, Earth, Sol)
