The Shape of Things to Come! ---------------------------- You will notice that there are two new drawing tools in the toolbox. The wavy line (next to the Create Button tool, is the Polyline drawing tool, this operates exactly as the polygon drawing tool except that the shape drawn is not closed, and is considered to be simply a series of connected lines. The second new tool is a five pointed star! This is to give you a taste of what is planned for the future development of WinRIP, you will not find this tool in other RIP painting programs, and if you do REMEMBER you saw it first in WinRIP. The 'Star' tool will draw a five pointed star in your image. The first stage is to click the mouse at the position where you want the center of the star to be position. As you move the mouse outwards from this point (without holding the mouse button down), a circle will be drawn. This circle represents the size of the star that is to be draw. Each of the five points of the star will touch the circumference of the circle. When the circle is the required size, click the left hand mouse button. The circle will be erased and the five point star drawn. Note, the star will be filled with the current fill colour and pattern. As the star is actually made of of a polygon, it is best to set the fill colour to the same colour as the drawing colour and the fill pattern to solid. It is planned to provide similar drawing facilities in future releases of WinRIP, this extends the range of drawing shapes available to the user from simple circles, rectangles etc to some very complex geometric shapes, all of which can be supplied by WinRIP as drawing tools. Future releases of WinRIP will provide a subsiderary toolbox containing these drawing features. The Windows Metafile Import. ---------------------------- The Windows Metafile Import facility has been modified to take advantage of the POLYLINE facility provided by version 1.54 of the RIPSCRIP specification. Polygons containing more than 512 points are no longer converted to individual 'Draw Line' commands but to POLYLINE commands. This makes a considerable saving on the size of the generated RIP image. It does mean however that images produced using the POLYLINE facility cannot be viewed by ANY RIP viewer that does not support RIP 1.54. This includes the RIPaint Demonstration 1.50 and Tombart v1.0. Windows Metafile Import. ------------------------ The Windows Metafile import facility has now been added. Please see the text file "METAFILE.TXT" for full details. Once you get to using WinRIP Lite, you will notice that some features are not active or present yet. This file will explain why and when you can expect these features to be present. Three years ago I became a victim of the recession in the UK and became unemployed. After a lot of consideration I decided to complete the education I negelected in my youth and to this effect I am currently taking a Maths Degree. Unfortunately, due to the amount of time I've spent developing WinRIP (anywhere between 14 and 18 hours each day), I've fallen behind with my studies. I have exams in October and unless I knuckle down I'm in serious danger of failing. So, WinRIP is being given a slightly lower priority. I will still continue to develop the software but priorities will be given to bug clearance if any are found. The features not present in the current version will be available by the end of September to mid-October. These include the Icon Editor (however as WinRIP imports Windows Icons, you can create new icons using a Windows Icon Editor), Clipboard Icons, and importing Windows MetaFiles (the code for the WMF import is half written, so it might be available a lot sooner). I hope you find that WinRIP meets your current needs and I am always interested in any comments (good or bad) you may have. Any software Author can only provide the products that are needed if he is kept informed of requirements, so feel free to let me know what you would like to see included in future releases. You may also find bugs, these will only be fixed if I know about them, so please keep me informed of any problems you encounter. Regards Ken Waddon.