Well, here’s another example that I would not have though appropriate for the Freehand Drawing Library. Regular geometric shapes might be drawable as strokes (i.e. press-move-release) with some sort of external control to force straight or constant-angle line segments. That concept, however, does not seem to fit in a freehand or freeform drawing library.
After some thought, many geometric shapes can be defined (even if somewhat arbitrarily) by a bounding rectangle. The current TwoPoint stroke class could easily be extended to define such a bounding rectangle. By injecting different drawing engines, it is possible to draw a nearly unlimited number of shapes inside that bounding rectangle.
To illustrate the idea, a GeometricShape class was created that extends TwoPoint. I developed three sample drawing engines for this stroke, Ellipse, Triangle, and BasicArrow. Each engine draws the bounding rectangle while the mouse is down and clears it on release. Pre-draw parameters may be assigned to each engine to further control the shape (i.e. select an isosceles or equilateral triangle or alter arrow shape).
While these engines may seem trivial, they open the door to creating a wide variety of such drawings in the FDL, and, all line decorators are available for each shape. So, if you want a dashed ellipse or dotted arrow, it’s simply a matter of injecting the desired line decorator.
An astute reader (aka existing beta users) may ask, “what about editing?” It’s easy to modify or extend these shape drawing engines to return the vertex information for the shape. This information can be edited and then stored in a value object. That VO may be sent as auxData in the stroke dataProvider. If present, the stroke could simply redraw the shape directly from the edited vertex information instead of a bounding rectangle. It’s all supported in the FDL architecture.
An update is going out to all beta users this morning.
The Algorithmist 