PenDraw™
Programmable Web Graphics

What's New

1. Gradient fill

2. Pattern fill

3. Animation

4. Ability to add RawSvg to the output stream

5. LCase and UCase functions for sStrings (omitted by accident from earlier versions)

6. DefineOnly attribute for elements

7. Pic PreDefined for elements

8. Hexadecimal constants

9. Plus some bug fixes. One bug allowed the paper colour to change if the client has CSS background colour defined. Jim Ley notified this one - thanks to Jim.

Cursor attribute added, to enable you to define the cursor shape when the mouse-pointer hovers over a graphic element eg Draw { Cursor "pointer" } Widget( ). Thanks to Sarah for suggesting it.

1. SVG MOBILE now added. PenDraw produces SVG BASIC for PDAs and SVG TINY for Mobile Phones.

2. Plus you can control the arithmetic accuracy of numbers in the SVG. Up to this version numbers were put out to 15 decimal places, which could be unnecessary and could waste download byte count. Now you can limit the space taken up.

3. Plus Start-Up hints added: feedback showed that users were missing important features, so these are now given in a hint window (that you can switch off).

1. Instructions fix: instructions to install licence key updated.

2. All working demos added to install.

1. Change of keyword. We changed Xlink to Anchor, because it better reflects what it does, and in future we may want to introduce some of the power of the XLink structure.

2. We added an ID to Anchor syntax, so that interactive graphics is possible through Anchors: with an id, a script can change the xlink:href field. This is to enhance support for interactive web work; so for example you can add data to be sent back to the server, through an HTTP form GET-like format.

3. We added the SVG Events line to Main, because without it you were not able to put events (eg OnLoad) in at the SVG level. Now you can. OnLoad is particularly useful at VSG level because you can use it to get hold of the SVG Document in a javascript (eg) object.

4. We have differentiated OnEvents (OnLoad, OnClick, etc) into three groups: a) those that are only allowed to have effect at the SVG level, b) those that can be used at SVG level and elsewhere, and c) those that can only be used elsewhere. This is a syntax differentiation, thus the compiler will prevent you from trying to construct code that will not have any effect.

5. We have updated the Manual accordingly.

6. We have expanded the Manual sections on Web interaction.

1. Bug fix: PenDraw I/O expected text files to have CR and LF in Windows, and LF in Linux (no CR), but on Windows servers PHP (eg) can produce only LF. That caused run-time errors. The problem is now fixed.

2. PenDraw web pages did not pass the W3 HTML Validator, nor CSS Validator. They do now.

3. PenDraw manual pages did not pass the W3 HTML Validator, nor CSS Validator. They do now.

1. SPECIAL CHARACTERS: Passes special characters eg ampersand & and hash # through so they are printed as special characters. Before, it would show them exactly as it found them. Now it passes the string through to SVG so that they are printed properly. So ampersand hash 163; (£) would show as a pound sign.

2. TSPAN: Allows you to put a tspan element in a String. See the manual for the implications of this. Briefly, you use tspan elements to act on a part of a character String, perhaps to change its colour.

3. FOR LOOP EXECUTION: Accelerated For loop execution.

4. FOR LOOP VARIABLE: Changed For loops so you can not change the value of the For-loop variable within the loop.

PenDraw programs now optionally produce SVGZ - zipped/compressed SVG. Internet Explorer with the Adobe plug-in recognises SVGZ automatically, so switching to svgz is done by changing one letter in your PenDraw program. Compression results vary, depending on your program, but PenDraw compression usually works very well indeed. Why? It is because PenDraw produces SVG so systematically that the order of SVG keywords does not vary, which gives the zipping algorithm truly excellent opportunities to spot repeating patterns.

Our best compression so far is 255kBytes down to 6kBytes!!

PenDraw version 2.0.a.1 is the very first release.

PenDraw has taken us a lot of time and effort. We hope you like it.