A fairly usable xpaint program (finally)

Tony Sanders (sanders@bsdi.com)
Thu, 05 Aug 1993 23:15:22 -0500


David Koblas <koblas@netcom.com> wrote a program called xpaint (current
version is 2.1.0). You can pick it up from:
ftp://export.lcs.mit.edu/contrib/xpaint-2.1.0.tar.Z
(nice net users will use archie to find a closer location)

It seems pretty functional if a little hard to use (hint: right mouse
button pops up menus for the icons which allow you to do things like
change brush and set the spray paint params).

Here is the README:

XPaint 2.1 Release

Welcome to the release of XPaint 2.1! So, what does XPaint do for
you? Why many wonderful things of course. XPaint is a reasonably
versatile bitmap/pixmap editing tool. XPaint came out of a problem
editing some very large bitmaps, and wanting more functionality then
was provided by bitmap. After XPaint 1.0 sat around for a LONG time, I
finally ended up with a strong need to edit color pixmaps. Presto,
this is what has appeared from that problem.

The short features list:
Usual paint operations:
Brushes, Spray paint, Pencil
Lines, Arcs, Pattern Fill, Text,
Boxes, Circles, Polygons.
Works on multiple images simultaneously.
Cut/Copy/Paste between all active images.
Fatbits/Zoom on the image windows.

XPaint is slightly biased towards a MacPaint-like operation set, since
this is the only paint program that I have ever used for more than 30
seconds, but not to let this discourage you, it does quite a bit more.
If you find some functionality missing and feel like adding it, there
is a rough description of how the operations interface works, and I'd
be more that willing to help you.

The following file formats are supported:
X11 Bitmaps reading writing
PPM Format reading writing
GIF Format reading writing
PostScript writing
XPM Format reading writing
TIFF Format reading writing (condinally compiled in)
SGI RGB Format reading writing (only on SGI machines)
If you have an image that is not in one of the supported formats I'd
reccomend you take a look at the PBMPLUS toolkit (which is availbe
for ftp from export.lcs.mit.edu, and other fine sites).

XPaint is written using ANSI C (for the most part), and thus you need
to have a compiler that understands function prototypes. On most MIPS
based machines this is the standard compiler, on a Sun SparcStation you
will either need to use 'gcc' or 'acc' (from Sun). If you have some
other brand of workstation, try using 'gcc' if your compiler doesn't
work.

Hope you find this useful,
David Koblas
koblas@netcom.com