🚀 go-pugleaf

derijkp@reks.uia.ac.be (Peter De Rijk) writes:

>I need to make rather specialised drawings (for the molecular biologists
>under you: RNA secundary structure models). Rumour has it that it is 
>possible to write extensions to Artworks. I would like to know whether this is 
>indeed possible, how it is done, how difficult (or easy) it is, and what the
>possibilities are. I need the possibility to create the drawing on basis of a 
>data file.
>I think I would also need following features:
>      dynamic grouping: The drawings are kind of tree like: when the user 
>         selects a branch (for instanse to rotate it), all depending branches 
>         should be selected and rotated together with the parent.
>      Text following a line, but the letters allways stay horizontal when 
>         rotated (yes somewhat like rotating a group of characters in 
>         RISC OS 2 Draw)
>I would like to know whether it is possible to implement these things 
>in/together with Artworks, well, for a non official developer that is.

If you only need to manipulate the tree structures, and no other fancy
objects it may be easier to make your own program from scratch that
just uses the Draw/Artworks data format and calls the module for
display. I have made programs that generate Draw format and have used
the Draw module for display. The hard part may be to program the
interactive manipulation part. I think something as fundamental as
selecting and grouping objects may be exceedingly difficult to change
in Artworks. I think the Artworks extensions are intended for adding
new kinds of objects and new transformations on existing objects.

	Torben Mogensen (torbenm@diku.dk)