COMPOSER.DOC

TURBO PASCAL SPRITE ARRANGING UTILITY

{ Requires : IBM Compatible Computer, PC or MS.DOS 2.xx, 256 k, }
{ and a CGA compatible color card. }

Copyrignt 1986 by Donald L. Pavia

This is a rather unsophisticated utility that I created to do a
very specific job. It is presented here without apologies. If you
can make use of it, so much the better.

Composer.Doc allows you to load any screen you have saved to disk
or to start with a blank screen (Med Res Graphics, 320 x 200, 4 color).
You may then load a sprite table, choose a sprite from the table,
move it around freely by use of the cursor keys. You may place it
at any allowed postion on the screen. Once you have the location you
desire, you may fix the sprite in that position and send a string to
your printer that records : table name, sprite number, col and row.
You may than choose another sprite from the table move it to a second
desired position relative to the first one. Once you are sastisfied with
the location, you may fix the position of the second sprite and send its
location to the printer. A sprite that has been fixed may be erased by
calling it up again, placing it directly over the undesired sprite, and
then "fixing' it again. You may also load other sprite tables at will
and use them for this same procedure.

I devised the Composer utility to help me arrange sprites for
drawing complicated chemical structures. With this utility it is quite
easy to arrange even 10 - 20 sprites into a structure. An example may be
found in Demo2.Pas.

The utility should also be useful as a guide to arranging animation
sequences which involve a number of sprites. The chemical animation
sequence in Demo3 was invented with the help of this utility.

You may load screens from PC Paint if you process them with the
utility SaveScrn.Com which is also found on this distribution diskette.
Screens from other Paint programs may be used if you use PC Paint's
Screen Capture utility and store them in uncompressed form (16 kbytes).

The following commands are available by pressing the indicated key:

(R)ecord Sends current coordinates of the active sprite to the printer
(S)et Fixes the active sprite at the current screen position - A
second fix will remove the sprite (xor).
(C)hoose Allows you to choose another sprite from the current table.
(L)oad Allows you to load a new sprite table.
(W)rite Saves the entire screen to disk so that you may come back to
work on it later.
(+) Steps When active the cursor moves sprites in increments of eight
pixels in both x and y directions (Default mode).
(-) Steps When active the cursor moves sprites in x increments of four
pixels (minimum for x) and y increments of one pixel.
(X) Exit Return to DOS, saves nothing.

These commands are found in a menu line at the top of the screen:

(R)ec (S)et (C)h (L)d (W)rit (+)/(-) (X)

At the bottom of the screen are coordinates of the current sprite.




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When you first start the utility you will be asked three questions:

Screen File ? : If you wish to load a saved screen from
disk, enter its name. If instead you
press you will have a blank
screen to work with (except for menus).

TableName ? : Enter the filename of the spritetable
you would like to load.

WhichSprite ? : Enter the number of the sprite you want
to begin with.

While you are moving sprites around on the screen they are "Put" and
you will see even their blank edges. However, to allow a subsequent
erasure, when you (S)et them they are "xor'ed" onto the screen.
In your own programs you can, of course, do this differently, but some
choice had to be made here. The main function of this utility is to
provide sprite coordinates not to actually compose the picture. That
will be done in your code.