Pictures Out Of Your Hat

When you can drag yourself away from Elite back to some serious programming of your own, you will find Artsystematic from Technation a very useful variation on the standard line-circle-fill graphics program.

There are the usual features - solid/dotted lines, filled/unfilled circles, rectangles and ellipses, freehand drawing, colour change, shape filf and text insertion.

All are keyboard run only, but besides that there are a number of nice routines which help towards fulfilling the aim of the program's designer, Alex Blok.

This aim is to enable the programmer to produce pictures in any mode, store them and then to be able to recall them in any program. You could create a slide show sequence to accompany a lesson or a business lecture, for example.

Graphs and charts are easy to construct using this program. Alternatively, you could run a Ceefax/Oracle style newsletter using Mode 7 screens to convey information - each screen in this mode only uses 1k and so one side of a 40 track disc can store 100 screens.

The pictures you have created can be called manually, stepping forward or backwards through the stored sequences just like a photo slide carousel, or automatically with a settable delay that is giving me some great ideas for open day presentations. Of course the higher the screen resolution, the lower the number of screens per disc, down to only five for Modes 0-2.

For doing the actual drawings there are helpful facilities like 'delete previous line', a variable background grid, 'rubberband' to show the position of a line before committing oneself, cursor position coordinate information and so on.

I particularly like the master/slave cursors which zoom around superimposed a lot of the time but separate to define line ends, circle and ellipse radii or rectangle diagonals.

The cursors' lock is a great idea, fixing the distance apart of the two cursors. By moving just the master it becomes possible to draw sets of parallel lines, repeated circles or rectangles anywhere on the screen.

There are also shading techniques available and a perspec tive guide routine. The program itself is not fantastically user friendly - as the manual admits - because it uses most of the available memory.

That is no hardship because the procedures are quite easy to get the hang of and the manual is quite comprehensive - if some what erratic in its spelling.

So altogether the designer and his friends have put together a package that builds upon the bog-standard graphic drawing package to make a very useful little item for display and demonstration purposes.

Terry Hallard