Paintworks by Activision for Atari ST. Disk, User's guide and reference card only.
"
Paintworks
When it first appeared, Paintworks, formerly N-Vision, filled in someof the gaps left by NEOchrome and DEGAS. It's a fairly powerful program,although it's been superseded by some of the new paint programs on themarket.
Paintworks does offer a nice array of drawing features- freehand lines,brush K-lines, radiating lines and many geometric shapes such as concentriccircles, ovals, squares and rectangles. Five different modes (Replace,See-through, Reverse, Mask and Cycle) govern most of the drawing functions,such as line, text and copy. These modes indicate how certain drawing toolswill affect the image You can create your own brushes by capturing blocks.The Block functions, which basically encompass Move and Copy, can be usedto transfer images between the main screen and the clipboard. Color controlsoffer options like Blend (which computes an intermediate shade betweentwo colors), Swap (which exchanges order or sequence of colors) and Copy(which replaces one color with another). There is also a sophisticatedcolor cycling feature, though it's fairly complex to use.
The text feature offers two fonts (serif and sans serif) which comein various styles and sizes, although this bare-bones feature could beenhanced and the individual characters designed with a little more finesseActivision has mentioned that more fonts will be available, although nonehave appeared as yet. Other details, such as X- and Y- coordinates, cursormovement from the keyboard, a three-level zoom and four fill modes addzest to Paintworks.
Paintworks includes strong support for printed output, letting you produceboth screen-sized or full-page images. The latter must be scrolled up anddown in order to be worked on, the advantage being a full 8.5 x 11-inchprintout. There is also a clipboard to experiment on ideas, the contentsof which may be saved or printed.
Paintworks's disk options enable Page, Screen and Clipboard files tobe saved or retrieved in compressed or uncompressed formats, the latterbeing NEOchrome-compatible. Also of interest is Activision's Music Studio,which you can tie into Paintworks and create musical slideshows. (A reviewof The Music Studio appears elsewhere in this issue.)"
