PCX Toolkit

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rather than the PC Paintbrush family of fonts. Of course, a conversion utility is included so that the user can go either way, but the library functions use the GEM format. This seems odd because all three packages emphasize PC Paintbrush compatibility and because of the .pcx emphasis.

One utility program which draws special attention is the txEdit stand-alone. This program allows the editing or creation of a PC Paintbrush type font. Unfortunately, it is limited to 16x16 pixels and is not meant for anything elaborate, as the documentation states. That is too bad because it means you must purchase yet another program such as Zsoft’s Publishers Type Foundary. Then, these have to be converted anyway to the GEM format for use in display only environment. Sound like a lot of pain for small gain?

PCXeffects:

PCXeffects provides quality display effects such as wiping, sliding and exploding of images. It also has some very interesting effects such as sand and drip where the image is built up slowly from top or bottom (like sand or dripping paint). This package also has a CUT utility to define an area of an image and save it to another file.

The package also contains music (a Ia Basic) functions and a utility which can be fun even with our little PC speakers. Most importantly, however, the libraries require the PCX Toolkit in order to be utilized(!?) Naturally, the three stand-alone utilities work fine,

but is that cause to segregate this package?

PCX Toolkit

The heart of these companion programs and libraries is, of course, the Programmers Toolkit. With the utility programs as inspiration and the companion libraries you can put together a heck of a graphics demo or training session. Of particular interest in this package are the PCXcut, PCXtrans and PCXgrab utilities. These utilities allow the user to capture any screen, text or graphics, cut out portions of interest into smaller files, then translate them back into text for document inclusion, if so desired, or leave them in .pcx format for use in publishing programs, such as Pagemaker. These can be extremely useful functions in manual preparation, for example, where portions of screens need to be reproduced and merged into text.

The PCXIib utility is also very useful as it allows the creation and management of image libraries. With the use of this utility, an entire slide show can be kept in one file which, if properly managed, should help keep the many incompatible video mode headaches under control. If you do assume the ugly prospect of distributing your graphics images to end users whc use the whole array of graphics adaptors known to man, then a library of the same images with the same names, but formatted by mode type, could be built. You would, then, avoid the potential disaster of sending a Hercules image out to an EGA user.

As of this writing, the only printer support is for the Hewlett Packard LaserJet Series II.

Dot matrix support is projected for a future release, but will no doubt be the Epson/IBM driver only.

Conclusion

These programs and library functions are nifty. I like what I can do with them and already have some ideas I’m anxious to try out. However, compared to other libraries they seem very pricey. There is some obvious and very useful capability here if you’re willing to plow through the three manuals and multiple libraries. But, to buy all three with source code, you rack up a grand total of $1097.00!! Even with the meager member discount of 10% this is big time spending for some nice library functions.

There is not space nor time here to cover all the functions available in these libraries. I have hit the high and lowlights and can safely say that graphics oriented programmers will find them essential after an initial exposure. No software has it all; but a keyboard interactive, font supported graphics mode would really add meat to the table for the group.

I implore the folks at Genus to combine these three into one, simple, easy to use library and associated utilities (which could easily be reduced in number due to the redundancy of the packages). Charge a reasonable price, and still sell more!

The Newsletter of the Dbase Language Professional Developers Group, October 1990

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