SUBMISSION:  Pencil.app 1.0 and PencilTCLClient

Pencil is a vector-oriented drawing program. Its most remarkable feature is that new drawing methods can be added to it in the form of postscript language procedures (even at run-time). However, even if you are unfamiliar with PostScript, Pencil can be quite useful with its built-in set of drawing methods. There are polygons, curves (hermite and bezier), circles, arcs, rectangles (also with rounded corners), character paths, "Rich Text" and so on. You can rotate, scale, group, clip, copy, paste, reorder and move graphics. There are numerous fill types (several gradients) and stroke types (including "neon light" gradient stroke). You can add shadows and other effects to a graphics object. You can print the document or copy it as postscript-code to the clipboard (for use in Edit etc.). You can scroll around and zoom into the view. There is even a basic freehand tool for drawing polygons. Import of TIFF/EPS-images is supported. A lot of sample documents are provided.

You can send commands to Pencil via Distributed Objects. I have written a program named PencilTCLClient (ptcl) to simplify this task. (ptcl is based on tcl 7.3 and tclsh by John Ousterhout, University of California at Berkeley) PencilTCLClient is available as source and binary, so if you don't have the tcl-distribution, you can use it anyway.

One can use ptcl to create/open/save/print documents, add graphic objects to the current document, edit the current selection and read out the graphic objects' attributes. This could be useful for writing scripts that create a graph in Pencil from some text data, so the user can edit it afterwards.

Pencil.app may be distributed under the terms of the GNU general public license.

Pencil.app can be found in:

Binary:
FTP://ftp.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/pub/comp/platforms/next/Graphics/vector/Pencil1.0.b.NI.tar.gz
This archive contains a fat (i386, m68k) binary.
-rw-r--r--  1 me        110853 Mar  5 22:05 Pencil1.0.b.NI.tar.gz

Source is available in:
FTP://ftp.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/pub/comp/platforms/next/Graphics/vector/Pencil1.0.s.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 me         77241 Mar  5 22:05 Pencil1.0.s.tar.gz

PencilTCLClient:
(Binary and Source)
FTP://ftp.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/pub/comp/platforms/next/Graphics/vector/PencilTCLClient.bs.NI.tar.gz
This archive contains a fat (i386, m68k) binary. The source doesn't include tcl.
-rw-r--r--  1 me        114601 Mar  6 17:59 PencilTCLClient.bs.NI.tar.gz

I've loaded up these files to cs.orst.edu. They should go to:

Pencil binary:
FTP://ftp.cs.orst.edu/software/NeXT/binaries/graphics/Pencil.1.0.NI.b.tar.gz

Pencil source:
FTP://ftp.cs.orst.edu/software/NeXT/sources/graphics/Pencil.1.0.s.tar.gz

PencilTCLClient source&binary:
FTP://ftp.cs.orst.edu/software/NeXT/binaries/PencilTCLClient.NI.bs.tar.gz


Florian Marquardt
a0047@freenet.uni-bayreuth.de
(March 30, 1995)