Version 2.00 of !XP1ReDraw

Now available at: http://clive.semmens.org.uk/RISCOS/index.php?XP1ReDraw

Loads more dash patterns for !Draw, plus railway lines, chains, all sorts. All work fine in !Draw, most can be converted to SVG for use in webpages or elsewhere on Other Platforms using !XP1Dr2SVG.

Just looked at the linked page on NetSurf – the SVG file of the key for the line patterns isn’t very well rendered by NetSurf 8~( – nothing wrong with my SVG, which renders fine on various browsers on Mac and PC. No, I’ve no complaints about NetSurf – I don’t blame anyone for not rendering SVG perfectly. But I do apologize for the fact that it’s an SVG image. The original Drawfile from which the SVG was generated is fine, of course – and accessible via the iconbar menu if you download and run the app (or if you download the app and have a poke around inside you’ll be able to find it without even running the app).

In fact the Drawfile is slightly better than the SVG in that four of the line patterns in the key can’t be rendered properly by SVG, so I removed them before converting to SVG. Bonus points for spotting all four.

To judge by the traffic on my website, there seems to be a fair amount of interest in this.

I should perhaps mention that the sets of patterns, that currently contain only fourteen patterns each (corresponding to the sixteen standard colours in the Colour Picker, minus black and white) could quite happily have considerably more (those “dummies” at the bottom) if the colour picker had a few more standard colours… I do actually use another 13 colours myself, but it’s a pain having to put in the percentages for them every time rather than being able to pick them with the Colour Picker…

Should I see if I can work out how to make a new colour picker myself (big learning curve for an old git there) or is anyone else interested in doing it? I suspect it would be useful in other contexts too.

IF I can intercept the SWIs to the Colour Picker (rather than writing a colour picker module & unplugging the built-in one) then I can make an app that does it. Under investigation…Edit: it’s bloody twaddle. Has to be a replacement module.

So – if the source of the Colour Picker module was in nicely commented Assembler, I might have a go at editing it – but I bet it’s in C.

but I bet it’s in C.

Looks like it…

https://www.riscosopen.org/viewer/view/apache/RiscOS/Sources/Video/UserI/Picker/

You could always rewrite it? Apparently it’s much easier and faster to write stuff in assembler… :-)

how to make a new colour picker myself

Isn’t this about the point when nemo should pop up and mention the complete lack of colour profiles and, indeed, such things as gamma correction. Hence colour picker is only useful for obtaining the same colour twice, not for attempting to make what’s on the screen resemble that which is printed… or, for that matter, appears on anybody else’s screen…

I was fairly confident of my bet.

CVS is pretty much a closed book to me. My C goes not a long way beyond “Hello World.” I did a three day intensive course in C++ once, sent by ARM who I think thought it would inspire me to greater things. The course was depressingly easy, and I sailed through it getting everything “right” but I’ve never used it in anger and I doubt I could even make Hello World work any more.

colour picker is only useful for obtaining the same colour twice

Well, since that’s exactly what I want it for, that’s reasonable enough! :) I’d just like to be able to get a few more than 16 colours easily and predictably the same. I don’t actually care what they look like – just that they have the same BBGGRR00 numbers…

You could always rewrite it?

Err. Yes, I could, but it would be one hell of a lot of work. I’m a great believer in reinventing the wheel – it’s easier than searching the literature – but I’m not a great believer in reinventing complicated stuff, when what I want is only a bit different.

It would be really nice if someone who does have the skills to edit it would, but that’s just dreaming unless a lot of people want the same changes.

ReDraw seems to be getting a LOT of hits on my website (73 at the last count – some of those twice or more from the same address, but I’ve not checked how many like that) – I’d be very interested to know if anyone’s using it & if so how they’re getting on with it.

Rick said

Isn’t this about the point when nemo should pop up and mention the complete lack of colour profiles

It seems my stand-in is doing just fine. ;-)

Indeed so. And I agree that colour profiles (and gamma correction) would be really useful. But for my present purposes, being able to get the same colour repeatedly easily would suffice.

Colour profiles would be very useful even in this connection, because while I can make a set of maybe 32 colours that I can distinguish easily on my monitor, other people may not find the same set easily distinguishable on their monitor. (Of course this depends to some extent on our eyes as well as our monitors, but there’s no amount of colour profiling that can fix that reliably.)