ivtools / News: Recent posts

The latest release of ivtools, 1.2.5, is the foundation for the release of a new open source project, ipl-1.0.1. ipl stands for the Invocation Programming Language, a concurrent programming language described in Karl Fant's book "Computer Science Reconsidered: The Invocation Model of Process Expression", Wiley-InterScience 2007.

ipl is a testbed and development environment for the language, and comprises a parser, a graphical editor and interpreter, and a C++ class hierarchy for representing language internals (as well as several example of concurrent programs to get you started).... read more

RPMs are now available for ivtools-1.1.3, both source and regular. Submitted by Michal Palczewski. They have been tested on RedHat 8 and 9.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=275&package_id=294&release_id=218008

Greetings to everyone interested in ivtools,

I hope you've enjoyed the work we've done with ivtools over the past ten years: the preservation and extension of idraw, the evolution of Unidraw, and the endless march keeping up with changes to Unix and C++. If you feel like expressing your gratitude with money, the project is now set up to receive PayPal donations here:

http://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id=275... read more

ivtools-1.0.6 has now been packaged for Jaguar (MacOS X 10.2) using fink: http://fink.sf.net

Make your own RPM for ivtools with newly uploaded spec file. The current binary RPM for ivtools was generated on RedHat 6.2, and seems to only work on RedHat 6.2. Hopefully someone will generate (and donate) an RPM from RedHat 7.* (be sure not to use gcc-2.96 though).

Scott

ivtools-0.4 introduces a new, and newly optimized, mechanism for alpha-transparent rasters. Under Edit/ImageProcessing/AlphaTransparent you enter a value from 0.0 to 1.0 to apply to all rasters in the current selection. Values are save/restored in the drawing editor document, and this transformation can be undone/redone like most other operations in these drawing editors.

The really good news is the alpha-transparent rendering mechanism has been optimized for TrueColor displays (X11 displays with 16 to 24 bits of colormap depth), which preserves expected interactivity once a raster is transparent.... read more

ivtools-1.0.3 has a minor fix for building on Darwin (MacOS X). Users of any other operating
system who've already got ivtools-1.0.2 can ignore this release.

ivtools-1.0.2 now builds from source on Mac OS X, the new Apple operating system derived from BSD with a Mach kernel. It relies on the 4.2.0 release of XFree86 available from either http://xdarwin.org or as a one-click installer direct from Apple: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_apps_utilities/

This release also refreshes the building of ivtools on Windows using Cygwin (see http://www.cygwin.com/xfree for a server). And it incorporates a lot of improvements to the HPUX build process as well. For a complete list of changes visit the changelog: http://www.ivtools.org/ivtools/ivtools-1.0-CHANGES.txt... read more

Here is a minor patch for ivtools-1.0.1 that keeps graphdraw compiling without ACE. It also changes the year in the CHANGES file to 2002 (I always goof that up the first time every year):

http://www.ivtools.org/ivtools/ivtools-020110-johnston-019.txt

Waiting for ivtools-1.0.1? Now your wait is over. It's here, with all the minor fixups you'd expect one release after the odometer rolled over, and a few new features as well: "None" background colors that make for semi-transparent patterns, comdraw raster commands for pixel poking and polygon clipping, etc.. Enjoy.

http://www.ivtools.org
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ivtools

ivtools-1.0 is now available. ivtools is a collection of vector-graphic editors derived from idraw with layered extensions for scripting, animation, and graph-editing. Seven years in the making, time to see what you can make with it:

http://www.ivtools.org

http://www.ivtools.org/ivtools/changelogs.html

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?IvTools

http://sf.net/projects/ivtools

http://sf.net/foundry/vectorgraphics

Here is a patch for building ivtools-0.9.7 with gcc-3.0, or on NetBSD, or on Linux Alpha:

http://www.ivtools.org/pub/src/patches/ivtools-011019-johnston-078

This is the last release in the 0.9 series for ivtools. The only changes between 0.9.7 and 1.0 will be those required to fix build problems in various environments. Grab a copy and try it out!

This release includes major changes to the command interpreter embedded in ivtools, to finalize the semantics prior to a 1.0 release. It has been extended with an APL-like mechanism for auto-vectorization of normally scalar operators (i.e. a stream times a scalar yields a stream, which can then be used to compose other expressions). This turns conventional looping inside out, and is a natural fit for certain graphical and imaging algorithms. ... read more

ivtools-0.9.6 adds support for gcc-3.0.1, as well as bit-wise operators to comterp: &, |, ^, and ~. The "^" operator had been a shortcut for the "pow" command (raise a number to a power), so watch out for that backward compatibility in existing scripts.

http://www.ivtools.org/ivtools/ivtools-0.9-CHANGES.txt
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ivtools
http://www.ivtools.org

ivtools-0.9.5 adds PNG support to ivtools drawing editors (via the use of pngtopnm). Now PNG graphics can be imported, saved, and restored via pathname (or arbitrary Unix command line). This makes PNG graphics equally well supported as JPEG, GIF, and aribitrary PostScript. idraw-formatted PostScript, PBM/PGM/PPM, TIFF, and XBM are native formats of the ivtools drawing editors and don't require add-on filters (see http://www.ivtools.org/ivtools/drawtool.html for more detail).... read more

A new release of ivtools, 0.9.4, is ready to be compiled and linked with gcc-3.0. The export/import drawing editor extensions have been rewritten where needed for libstdc++ v3. There are a few known problems I haven't been able to resolve (gdb doesn't yet work with the C++ generated by gcc-3.0), so if you rely on these mechanisms, especially when built with ACE, you probably want to stay with gcc-2.95.* for now.... read more

new save and export (keyboard) commands for comdraw,
plus coordinate conversion (screen to drawing,
drawing to screen). Help returned in keyboard command
interpreter window.

http://www.ivtools.org

New feature: save graphics or rasters imported from Unix filter commands by writing only the command line to the ivtools document file. Subsequent opens rerun the commands, which regenerates the graphics or rasters. Now you can assemble arbitrary output from Unix commands into a layered graphic, single or multi-frame. Useful for displaying the state of video hardware, the content of image databases, or the output of image processing and analysis. This capability joins the existing save/restore by URL capability that made it possible to add hyperlinks to ivtools documents. Together they allow for the easy composition of completely arbitrary graphical displays computed and composed from the many possible resources you have available on the net and your machine. Build from source tested on RedHat (6.1), Debian (unstable), and FreeBSD (3.1) ... read more

ivtools-0.9.1 is out with minor changes like
incorporate verbiage for GPL dual licensing and fixing the version number reported by executables when they start running.

http://sourceforge.net/ivtools/ivtools-0.9.1.tgz
http://www.ivtools.org
http://www.ivtools.org/ivtools/ivtools-0.9-CHANGES.txt

A major new release of ivtools is now available:

http://download.sourceforge.net/ivtools/ivtools-0.9.tgz

Since 0.8 we've focused on extending the command set for the scripting language built in to the drawing editors, including the traditional debug commands of step, trace, and pause.

A new release of ivtools, 0.8.4 from
http:/download.sourceforge.net/ivtools/ivtools-0.8.4.tgz now builds
on FreeBSD (tested with bsd.compile.sourceforge.net).

An interesting new feature is the ability to draw then import a custom toolbutton. With it you can plop down copies of its graphic where you want in a drawing. Useful for those drawing repetitive material, like children's schoolwork.

http://www.ivtools.org
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ivtools

ivtools-0.8.3 has many improvements to the vector-graphic scripting language embedded in ivtools comdraw, including a new global variable mechanism and a "pause" command useful for debugging comdraw scripts.

The command interpreter used in comdraw is fully byte-compiled, supports C expression syntax, and has a full complement of control constructs implemented as regular commands with deferred execution of their body. This is done with an efficient and unique combination of pre-fix and post-fix evaluation of the expression tree that limits the runtime stack to linear growth, making use of the interpreter rather scaleable.... read more

A rather useful "pause" command has been added to ivtools comdraw (see latest version in the CVS repository). This can be embedded in comdraw scripts to suspend replay, and allow for arbitrary commands (or other user interface interactions) to occur until a stand-alone C/R is entered. It can also be used for debugging comdraw scripts, allowing the programmer to inspect (and modify) the value of any global or local variable before resuming execution of the script. This is the first of three script debugging commands planned for ivtools-0.9 (the other two: step and trace).... read more

The new home page for ivtools is http://www.ivtools.org

Get a copy of the BSD/MIT licensed web pages at:
http://sourceforge.net/project/filelist.php?group_id=275

vhclmaps is a package of map-visualization and vehicle simulation software that builds on top of ivtools. Now this project is hosted at SourceForge as well: http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=1653