Big Photo Scraps

by Dick Estel


In the early days of GEOS, users were delighted with the capability in geoPaint of being able to create
designs and drawings, and then copy a part of the design to another geoPaint document or to a
geoWrite document.

This same capability extended to geoPublish when it was released in 1987. However, creative users
also began to experience the major limitation of this feature--the area copied can be no larger than the
drawing window, which is about 1/10 of the page in 40 column mode.

Patient computerists could get around this limitation by copying larger artwork in sections, but pasting
the pieces back together correctly took patience, time and a lot of touch up work.

In 1989 programmers in the public domain arena came to the rescue with several programs that
allowed the creation of photo scraps larger than the drawing window.

One of these was Big Clipper by Nick Vrtis, which requires you to define the desired copying area in
terms of pixel locations. This can be done by intelligent guesstimates, with a series of trial and error
steps, or you can view the document in geoPaint and measure the pixel locations before opening Big
Clipper.

About the same time Dennis Seitz uploaded Paint Scrap, which would create a photo scrap of the
entire geoPaint document. While these programs were a major step forward, the oversize photo scraps
created could only be pasted into geoPublish, which is the only GEOS application that allows you to
work on the full page.

Within the last three months, Dennis has upgraded Paint Scrap, and two new programs have been
uploaded, that greatly increase the flexibility of working with photo scraps. Big Clipper 2.0 and ScrapIt
both allow you to create your photo scrap from a screen that is just like the preview mode in geoPaint.
In this mode you can see a small representation of your entire document, but you can't actually work on
it. These two programs allow creation of a scrap by framing the desired area just like geoPaint, but with
a view of the whole document.

Although Dennis planned to upgrade Big Clipper to allow pasting the oversize scrap into geoPaint, this
upgrade never appeared

The other new program is the similarly named Scrap It! This program has enormous flexibility, although
in its current version it is incredibly slow, even when used in the RAM expander.

This program allows conversion of Doodle, Koala and other drawing formats to geoPaint documents or
photo scraps, as well as the conversion of geoPaint photo scraps to geoPaint documents and vice
versa. It does NOT appear to support creation of oversize scraps, but it does allow conversion of
geoPaint to Doodle, Koala, Print Shop and other formats. This is the first program I have seen that
allows conversions FROM GEOS.

A program with similar capabilities that opens up creative opportunities is geoFetch, which is found on
Lodestar Disk 65. This program creates a photo scrap from any part of any GEOS screen when you
are able to access desk accessories. It cannot be used when there is a pull-down menu or dialog box
displayed, since you are limited to clicking in those areas. But it can be used while in normal editing
mode in all the GEOS applications, allowing you to create photo scraps of parts of the desk top or
something like the geoPaint tool box graphic which appeared in last month's GEOS column.

With these add-on programs by independent programmers, GEOS has taken on a degree of usefulness
and flexibility that even the bright minds at Berkeley Softworks did not envision.

(A year 2000 PS: Nate Fiedler's geoCanvas finally gave us the ability to paste oversize scraps intoeoPaint as well as get them out.)

(From The Interface, newsletter of Fresno Commodore User Group, 3/90, via the Commodore
Information Center, http://home.att.net/~rmestel/commodore.html)