LINEdesign was conceived primarily as a drawing program and, although you can put text on the page, the editing facilities are very limited, especially since you can only work on one page at a time.
LINEdesign is a vector drawing program and this means that a drawing is stored as a list of operations on a page. This has some advantages in that the user can change and edit many operations and the only thing that changes is the list of operations themselves. There is more information stored about the drawing and how it is made than the drawing itself. This allows a greater range of editing facilities than in other graphic drawing programs. For example, in most drawing programs an object, once drawn on the page, can only be removed by using some kind of eraser, destroying whatever may lie underneath. LINEdesign can remove an object but leave the rest of the drawing intact.
Another advantage of vector drawing is that the printed output can be rendered in different resolutions and will look (almost) the same on a 9-pin printer as it does on a 24 pin.
The major disadvantage of this is that the program will be slower than its bitmapped equivalent because everything has to be recalculated each time it is re-drawn. Although the memory usage is very efficient (i.e. one font description can be used in any size) it still takes a lot of memory. If a single line is drawn the program not only remembers the start and end points but also the attributes etc.
Of course the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The ability to change everything about an already drawn object gives the user a lot of security. Don't worry if it does not look good yet - you can make it look good !
LINEdesign software and manual are copyrighted material with all rights reserved. It is forbidden to copy or multiply any part of the LINEdesign software or manual without prior written permission from PROGS, PROfessional & Graphical Software, with the exception of making a backup. LINEdesign was written by Nathan Van der Auwera until the beginning of 1996. After that, all work was done by Joachim Van der Auwera.
Although much care is taken in the development of the LINEdesign software and manual, in no circumstances will PROGS, Professional & Graphical Software, be liable for any direct, indirect or consequential damage or loss arising out of the use or inability to use the LINEdesign software or documentation.
Having said this, it speaks for itself that PROGS will continue to develop this manual and software. Therefore, we would appreciate any comments about our software and manual. We are only human, we can do no more than our best to provide you with the highest quality software. If we do notice some inconsistencies between the documentation and the software, there may be an additional file on the program disk.
There are a few people we have to thank for their help in making this product what it is now :
We now present you with LINEdesign v2.10, a modern and powerful program for the QL market.
We started off with The PAINTER, which we still rate very highly, but the user interface is now old fashioned. Following that we produced LINEdesign v1. This was our first draft and we needed to see if the QL market was interested in this kind of program. Unfortunately, LINEdesign v1 was slow and too many things were just not possible with it.
We have completely rewritten the program, using a better user interface and drawing routines that are faster and more powerful (PROforma),...
At the beginning of 1996, we released a new environment with ProWesS. This included a much improved version PROforma and a windowing sytem which uses PROforma for all drawing. So, it was only normal that we would modify LINEdesign to use the new PROforma and many of the other exciting features of PoWesS.
Big rework of LINEdesign to make it function under ProWesS. This means that it now uses PROforma v1.10 or higher and all the submenus are nor ProWesS menus. The code size has also been reduced thanks to the use of DLL's and various improvements in the code.
A driver is a set of characteristics and routines which describe the behaviour of a certain output device (like a printer, or the screen). This usually includes such details as size, resolution, available colours... On the other hand you can probably attach your printer both to a serial port, or a parallel port, or maybe you just want your image to to output to a file. Therefore, you always have to specify the driver (how to draw), and a device (where to draw) when you want to print the page.
There are actually two meanings for this term, a device interpretation and a graphical interpretation.
This can be defined as the line that goes from the intial do or hit that you placed on the screen to define the startpoint and the next do. A subpath is either open or closed. In a closed subpath the final do is at the point marked as the startpoint.
A path segment is either a line or a bezier curve. Circular arcs are converted to bezier path segments.
Bƒzier is a French mathematician who works for Renault and who "invented" a description/display method for curves based on Bernstein polynomials.
In LINEdesign we only use cubic bezier curves. That is curves which
consist of four points : the two endpoints (which are on the curve),
and two controlpoints (which are off the curve).
Collection of graphical shapes, which can usually be combined to give readable text. The font files currently have a lot of similarity with the Adobe Type I font format (slightly adopted for easier access, which also makes them a bit shorter).
Fonts are handled quite efficiently. Even when several copies of LINEdesign use the same font, it will only be loaded once.
PROforma automatically releases a font when it is not loaded into a program. Special routines are included to make sure this is always true (even when a job is force removed). When a font is loaded it is placed in the "fontlist" for that gstate.
This is a table of all known fonts. This table is used to map a fontname to a fontfile. You cannot use a font which is not in the fontmap !
Fonts can be added to the fontmap using the PFConfig program.
This is the list of the fonts which have already been loaded, and which can be used.
To increase the drawing speed of text, often used characters are also kept in an internal format which can be displayed much faster than the standard representation of the font. This is called the font cache. LINEdesign always tries to use the font cache.
Because the font cache has a limited size, a replacement algorithm must be used. Only the least recently used characters are removed from the font cache. The capacity of the font cache is not reduced because of fragmentation.
You can change the size of the fontcache using the PFConfig program.
Because typography uses many characters, LINEdesign uses a special extended character set, which contains many more characters then the standard character set which is supported by the operating system.
These characters can be accessed by their PostScript® name, which should be put between backslashes (e.g. \onehalf\ for ½). When a font is printed using the FontShow program which is part of the fontutils package, then the full name of the characters is displayed below each glyph.
To increase the cohesion of a combination of characters, it is often not enough to position all characters side by side. Some character combinations have to be put closer together (or further apart) to make sure that they are visually equally spaced (same amount of whitespace between characters). This process is called kerning. A typical example is the word "AWAY."
Another typesetting feature is that some characters sequences like "ff", "fi", "fl", "ffi", "ffl" should be replaced by special characters which look better. Ligatures are supported in the Extended Character Set and can therefore be used : just put them between backslashes (e.g. \fi\). Please note that not all fonts have ligatures !
An object is the basic entity on the page. An object can be a path, a circle or pie, a square or rectangle (possibly with rounded corners), a headline, a paragraph or a bitmap.
A combined object is a path object with more than one subpath. The paths which you can draw in LINEdesign only have one subpath. However, this may sometimes not be sufficient, therefore path objects can be combined.
A group is a collection of objects. There are two uses for the word group in LINEdesign.
LINEdesign uses points as the metric unit. This unit, which is commonly used in printing and desktop publishing, divides an inch in 72 equal parts. The abbreviation for point is pt. Please not that the size is not well defined, some source say there are 72.27 points in an inch (or 72.307).