UVIEW

Copyright (C)1999 by Doug Garmon

UVIEW is FREEWARE, and no restrictions are attached to it's use.

In some ways, UVIEW is superior to GSVIEW-- it allows faster zooming and panning, it's a much smaller download, and doesn't require a large or complicated installation with many fonts. Also, fonts in UVIEW have a background color (white) which makes them easier to read when overlapping lines. I will eventually add such a feature in pure postscript code, as it is very helpful. UVIEW is still in a very simple but useful form.

UVIEW also has limited capabilites for viewing Adobe Illustrator documents. Jump to see examples.

A sample .ps file displayed in UVIEW. The VERTs are labeled in blue and the sample intersects are in red. The BOUNDING BOX and SAMPLE LINES are grey.

The mouse is used to navigate within the UVIEW interface.

Left mouse click + drag	Pan the display
Right mouse click	Zoom in
Right mouse click + Shift key	Zoom out

FILE

Open	Open a .ps file
Properties	PRINTING   Set Printer Scale Factor  Scales the printout manually. The printout scale must not be automatic, or it would be impossible to compare two planks from the same design, as they will have different dimensions and scale differently. Set Printer Offset (x,y)  Move the printout origin manually. In printer coordinates (yours may vary).  Show Printer Stats (default: checked)  Prints info (scale factor, etc) on printout.  USER INTERFACE    Show Figure while Panning (default: checked)  Refresh the display during mouse pans. If not checked, the display will blank until the mouse button is released.  Draw Wireframe Only (default: NOT checked)  Display without fills and colors.  Show Origin XHairs (default: checked)  Show the cross-hairs at the document origin. OK  Click to accept values  Cancel  Click to cancel changes
Print	Opens a Windows print dialog, prints the display.
Exit	Quit UVIEW

VIEW

Reset

Resets the origin to the bottom left and the magnification to a reasonable value.

HELP

About

Displays a dialog with ABOUT info, and a short help message.

NOTES:

1. The SHOWPAGE cmd, which is optional but helpful when viewing files in GSVIEW, has no effect in UVIEW. You may include it or not, at your whim.

AI files are a relatively old vector file exchange format, but are useful because they can be either inported into graphics editors or dumped directly into a postscript printer or interpreter. UNFOLD tries to create a minimally compliant AI file as output.

To view a AI file, the dot suffix ".ai" must be replaced with ".ps" , or UVIEW's Open dialog will not display the file.

UVIEW can display a subset of AI commands. However, UVIEW will fail to clip paths and add patterns, and many of the font operators are unimplemented. I may address these shortcomings in the future IF it can be done without making VUIEW much slower AND if it can be done without a huge investment in time (clipping paths would be easy to medium-difficult, but the wxWindows graphics context does not include a matrix transformation or any mechanism for font rotation. This would require rendering to memory, rotating , then XORing the image to the screen).

Example .ps files included with the GHOSTSCRIPT distribution displayed on UVIEW:

golfer.ps	an extreme closeup of tiger.ps

About UVIEW

UVIEW was created using the freeware EGCS 1.2 compiler (Experimental GNU Compiler System, which is basically GPP) for MSWindows (95 and above) systems. The GUI system used was wxWindows, a freely distributed, cross-platform C++ GUI library (I have looked at some MFC code, and it made me a little ill. Too many macros to suit me...). GPP is, well, legendary, and I can also highly recommend wxWindows.

UVIEW should run on MSWIN 95/98 and Windows NT, also.