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I was asked to take another look at Picture Maker after Gordon Lee complained that the instructions were difficult to find and use. Weil, unfortunately, for David Makin, the author, I must concur with Gordon Lee on many points. The instructions, which are the only problem, are on two sheets of A4 paper in Lilliput type, so in order to make things a little easier for myself I ran the instructions from the program (where they are available) through my printer and received the same information, minus the screen dump routine.

The whole object of a set of instructions is to allow the absolute beginner to understand them, carry out the necessary commands and produce the object for the activity (Pardon, Roland??). The problem inherent in Pioture Maker is that the program is extremely sophisticated, and the instructions do not give a working example with which to practice. Utilities are there to provide the ordinary computer user with a facility that he can make use of fairly readily, and Picture Maker does not yet meet that criterion.

The two pages of instructions, although detailed, are not comprehensive nor easily read. There have been other utility programs in the past for creating graphic screen displays; one that springs to mind is Graphic Writer by B. R. Smith, which can be run in PMODE0, 2 or 4, and is less sophisticated than Picture Maker but comes complete with a fourteen-page instruction booklet written in single, easy-to-follow routines that are logical and sequential. Pixel Editor, which can also be used to create and edit graphics shapes in modes 3 and 4, contains the equivalent of five pages of fine A4 print for its instructions, complete with an example.

It would appear that David has put a very great deal into Picture Maker, but it cannot be accessed and used to its full because of his assumption that the user will find it easy-to-follow, which is not the case.

However, I was impressed with the functions of the program itself. The ability to move areas about, to delete and replace, and indeed even to stretch stored areas horizontally or vertically is all there. Alterations are automatically re-numbered, and you can store up to eight different areas at a time depending on their size, which needs to be remembered when attempting to stretch an area, because obviously if the resulting area is then too large or a !feight areas have been used, there will be insufficient room and the program will ignore the function. A most impressive command is the M for magnify, which magnifies the area under the cursor position on the normal viewing screen to a magnified version on a different screen. The size of the area magnified (not the magnification itself) can then be enlarged by a simple key depression, and colour change too set at the touch of the keyboard. The magnification screen is then updated even when not in use, which allows the speed of movement to be controlled. To couple all these functions to a true 'picture maker' which will draw lines, colour in a foreground colour from the cursor position or a border in the background colour or conversely, all of which is automatically saved to another screen and can then be dumped using a screen dump routine at the end, is quite an achievement.

I enjoyed experimenting with this program, but reverting to my earlier comments I do believe that David should present his instructions in an expanded and more readable manner, perhaps in the form of a booklet using what he has already written with a couple of working examples that the user can follow and then change of experiment with, in this way I feel sure that this excellent program would be used rather than attempted and put away. One cannot tell a book by its cover and in this case the 'cover' detracts from the real story.