User Defined Pattern Lines

[Subbi Iyer]

Is there anyone to help me,

How to draw a bitmap along the Curved path.
I'm using a windows 95 machine , I tried with the ExtCreatePen fn, but for the Bitmap Pen it fail to create the pen. Then i used with the
BeginPath(),EndPath(), FillPath(). here also i failed. Can anyone help me to sortout the problem.

Advance thanks.

Subbi.

[F. Petitjean]

It is explicitly said in the documentation that the *Path() functions are available only on Windows NT systems.

[Subbi Iyer]

Hi Petitjean,
Thanks a lot for u'r suggestion. But i need the Pattern line drawing so urgent. Is there any other way we can achieve this on a windows 95 systems. Please help me.

Thanks a lot,
Subbi.

[F. Petitjean]

I don't know the constraints of your project ( time,budget ...). There are seemingly financial and/or technical limitations.
Here are a few solutions :
- "Upgrade" your programming environment to Windows NT 4 (last service pack). Note that all users of your program are also required to have NT. This option seem preferable if you target to sell to the corporate world where the price of the software (OS +applications) is only a part of the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of a PC. (Be sure also that your boss is well that some basic tools are required, however expensive).
- On the other end, if you target the home user, other options are to be considered. Perhaps, a technical hack such as fiddling with GDI regions (or FillPolygon()) would do the trick. You were not enough specific to explain your need of the *Path() functions.
- If these technical difficulties cannot be overcome, (the Win32 API pn Windows95 is not sufficient/adequate ) you may have to explore other alternatives. The Qt library has a good 2D imaging API modelled after the PostScript language. Hence, it should support the path concept pretty well ( I'm not sure, but isn't Adobe who created a path API first ?). The Qt library is a commercial product of troll. http://www.troll.no/ The documentation is very good and Qt is supported on Windows, Unix ( BSD ..) and Linux. So it offers you a migration path to other environments.
- You may also consider to switch to another operating system which may better fill your needs. On Intel (or compatible) hardware, there are a number of BSD variants (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSDi ), Linux (mostly POSIX compliant) BeOS (multimedia) Solaris.. Perhaps at your local newspaper stand you may find a computer magazine bundled with such an OS on a CDROM or a friend of you may give you such a CDROM. With FreeBSD, you can download the content of 5 floppies, other software is then grabbed by FTP from Internet. Likewise, the Debian distribution (GNU/linux) has a command to update a package from the Net. Naturally, if you have never heard of UniX, POSIX, X Windows System (and nobody in your company knows Unix) you will have a lot to learn and ask your boss for a formation period.
Other points are to be taken into account : these systems are Y2K compliant (and not "compliant with minor issues" as in Microsoft speak), they are also well immune to virus attacks, a mechanism of rights in the filesystem limits the propagation of the virus (NT has a fine grained ACL system, but in general the root directory is not protected as this prevents a lot of installation programs to be run). In all cases, the price is correct (for example a few dollars at Linux Systems Lab or cheapbytes). If you code according to right standards there are no major compatibility problems (Are you sure that your application will run fine, first time on Windows 2000? ). From an application point of view, there are very few differences between Linux and other Unices, and there are much less differences between Linux distributions than between various Windows OS :
Windows 3.1
Windows for Workgroup
Windows 95
Windows 95 OEM
Windows 95 OSR2
Windows 98
Windows 98 SPx
Windows NT 3.51
Windows NT 4.0
Windows NT 4.0 SP1 SP2 SP3 SP4 SP5?
Windows 2000 (which beta?)
Windows CE
+ variation if some other products are installed :
with IE4 installed, with/without IE5 installed. with/without a version of developer Studio (different versions of MFC or C runTime libraries)

I have read in an InfoWorld forum that somebody can say, for a given distribution (ex RedHat 6.0), what are the critical system libraries : name directory, size and date without having access to the user system, simply by looking at his system.

You may also have a look at the Kirch paper to have a comparison of NT and Unix systems.

Have a good day.

[Subbi Iyer]

hi Petitjean,
Thanks a lot. U'r suggestion is most useful for me. We've already having the software and we have around 10 users of that. The users are already using Windows 95 machine. We need to release the next version of the software. So we need the pattern line functionality on that.