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APPLE II DEVELOPMENT FORUM CONFERENCE LOG
Tuesday, March 20, 1990 10:00 pm eastern time
Topic: Programming Environments
Forum Leader: Gary Jacobson (AFA Gary J)
AFA Gary J Welcome to the Apple II Development Forum
AFA Gary J Tonight's topic is "Programming Environments"
AFA Gary J It looks like we need to use forum PROTOCOL, so....
AFA Gary J If you have a question, type a "?" on a line by itself, or if you
have
AFA Gary J a comment on the current topic, type a "!" on a line by itself.
It looks
AFA Gary J like "Mac Hater" got the first question in. GA, Mac Hater
Mac Hater has Nicholas expanded on his post "there will be a new development
tool within
Mac Hater 72 hours.." or does anyone (who can tell us) say more? sounds
pretty fun.
Mac Hater ga
A2GS Drop the ! and make it a ?
Mac Hater guess not. :) ga
AFA Gary J I guess no one's talking, Mac Hater. Anyone?
Mac Hater ga with the next question
AFA Gary J Ok.. GA, A2.
A2GS Not a direct programming Q, but does deal with Devloping for the
II....
A2GS As far as I can tell, Apples opinion/marketing of the II
stinks....
A2GS Is there anything we can do change it?????????
AFA Gary J GA, Pest
Pest II I think that perhaps that's a little strong...
A2GS You can't be serious?!
Pest II I think that there are many people at Apple who'd like to see a
healthy AppleII
Pest II perhaps they aren't the "right people" though...what I'd do is
write to the
A2GS Yes, But I'm referring to the guy's who make the $ decisions (ex.
marketing)
Pest II "powers that be" the people who can indeed change that sort of
thing
Pest II Unless you want to infiltrate Apple (like I do :-))
A2GS Unfortunately there have been dozens of writing campaigns and it
doesn't look
A2GS like they've accomplished anything.
AFA Gary J GA with your comment, Tracy
AFL TracyP Barney Stone's group may have turned around the top-echelon
Matt DTS There have been dozens of campaigns *discussed*. I personally
don't know of one that happened.
AFL TracyP of marketeers at Apple, but apparently those efforts
Pest II Me niether Matt
AFL TracyP have yet to translate to the rank-and-file. How else do you
A2GS That is a possibility, Matt, But either way I'm sure the head hogs
know
AFL TracyP explain Apple's announcement of the DMA SCSI card st week,
AFL TracyP then a big party for a whole herd of Mac announcements
A2GS how II people feel and a letter won't make any difference (nor
will 10,000
A2GS letters, unfortunately)
AFL TracyP yesterday? Why not include the SCSI announcement with the
AFL TracyP rest? Or is Apple still trying to tell us they're ashamed of the
A2?
AFL TracyP done
A2GS Yes, I think they are.
AFA Gary J Interesting point, Tracy
AFA Gary J GA, Danny
AFA DannyH I don't want to sound like an apoligist for Apple but, I think
Apple has done
AFA DannyH one helluva job for the Apple II users for the last TWO
years....
AFA DannyH we hanve seen new peripherrals and new computers as well
AFA DannyH as a lot of new System Software with prromises
AFA DannyH of even more to come, GA
A2GS Oh come on......there hasn't been an ad for a II in the past 2
years
A2GS and in that time I've seen 100's of Mac ads, saw one a few days
ago!!!
A2GS Big deal!!!
A2GS I'm talking about future developments (ex. machines) as well as
Marketing
A2GS which will make the machine strong and improve 3rd party
development, which
A2GS as this point is virtually Nill, except for a few loyal companies.
A2GS Done.
AFA Gary J I think we all could run on this topic all night, but it's true,
that's not
AFA Gary J what we're here for.
LordRoland I agree --> new topic.
AFA Gary J Let's move on to Markus's question. GA, Markus
Markus I've heard APW is going to be updated. Has anyone heard anything?
ga
A2GS I warned you this wouldn't be a programming Q :)
AFA Gary J GA, Roland
LordRoland Yeah, APW is being updated. I don't know much though. New linker
and stuff.
Micol Sys Any day now, from what I hear
Markus Any idea how soon?
LordRoland Or am I thinking of ORCA?
AFA Gary J GA, Coach
Micol Sys Or sometime in the near future (next few months)
Tamira didn't APW 3 just come out???
Coach101 In the last 6 months Apple issued an update for APW (tools and
interfaces)
Coach101 that included a new linker, librarian, REZ and DeREZ tools.
Markus Yep, got those when they first hit. :)
Coach101 There is an APW 2.0 meandering its way through Apple but when it
will be
Coach101 released would be anybody's guess... I think there is a little
more
Coach101 information in the development environment area here in ADV..
ga
Markus thanks. I'm done. :)
AFA Gary J Ok, Thanks Markus (and Coach). Let's move on to Gibber's
question.
A GibberFC Does anyone know when the new sound tools will be available?
A GibberFC I called APDA and they had info on them but no date :(
A GibberFC ga
AFA Gary J I have no idea, anyone else?
LordRoland Hmm. I thought they were coming with Sys. 6.0.
A GibberFC The person that had the answer ducked out..
A GibberFC :(
Pest II If APDA doesn't know...does anyone?
AFA Gary J Release dates are hard to come by with ANY software.
Coach101 APDA (phone people) would probably not know until it was
deliverable !
LordRoland Matt would've known.
AFA Gary J (Especially comeing from Apple)
A2GS Dave????
Dave Lyons Sorry...don't know.
Dave Lyons (I'm sure APDA doesn't know, though.)
AFA Gary J Ok, Let's move on to LordRoland's question. GA.
LordRoland OK. I'm working on a term. program. Everything is speeding along
fine except
LordRoland for the text. I was using the toolkit, but obviously it's too
slow. It seems
LordRoland that the best way to do it is to zap the char. directly into
screen ram.
LordRoland Does anyone have any recomendations as to the easiest way to go
about doing
LordRoland this. I don't relish typing in the individual bitmaps for the
letters.
LordRoland GA
AFA Gary J GA, Pest
Pest II Well, I thought that the zapping into RAM method was exactly the
sort of thing
Pest II that Apple want us to avoid...have you used the COUT routine?
Pest II I don't know that it's any faster, but you probably wouldn't have
to
AFA Gary J COUT? On the graphics screen?
LordRoland No, I haven't. It's graphics based. Desktop. I need more speed.
I don't
LordRoland really care about Apple Guidelines. GA
Pest II Ah, I see...thought you meant text text
LordRoland Sorry Apple :)
AFA Gary J GA, A2
A2GS Seeing as how your somewhat of an "Apple Rebel" like myself :)
.....
Coach101 Ga Dave
Dave Lyons If you're using QuickDraw, you'll get a *big* speed
A2GS What exactly are you trying to avoid (besides the tools)?
Dave Lyons benefit from drawing a LINE at a time (with, say, DrawString)
Dave Lyons instead of a character at a time.
Dave Lyons As far as going by the "Apple guidelines" goes, if you can't get
the job done with the
Dave Lyons toolbox, by all means do what you have to do. Just realize that
rules aren't there to give
Dave Lyons fascists something to do, but to maximize compatibility with
future hardware and software,
Dave Lyons and with other present software (for ex, your
A2GS <-- Facist???
LordRoland I hate buffering the text though, cause it just doesn't seem
'natural'.
A2GS What are you trying to do/avoid doing?
Dave Lyons app will work much better with a DA in front of your window if
you're drawing with QD than if
Dave Lyons you're drawing right to the screen!).
LordRoland I just want the letters up fast. I want the screen to keep up
with the modem.
A2GS Then use Apple's default font....
Dave Lyons In other words, Apple doesn't invent rules to *annoy* you, but
to
Dave Lyons make life cool in the long run.
LordRoland Not fast enough. A2
Coach101 How fast is fast?
A2GS store the bitmaps of the letters in a lookup table....
A2GS (you didn't let me finish :)
LordRoland Right on A2GS, but I don't want to type in the bitmaps. I'd
prefer to get
A2GS Then use an x,y coordinate system to draw the characters at the
correct
A2GS place on the screen.
A2GS So use Apple's defualt font!!
LordRoland the font in memory and then bypass QD in getting them up.
A2GS Capture it from a SHR screen or something.
LordRoland Hmm. I thought about that. I guess that's my only option.
Mac Hater is Quickdraw using shadowing? that'll speed up. also preshifted
shaston is
Mac Hater fast.
A2GS It's the easiest (if you ask me)
AFA Gary J But as Dave points out, you loose system compatability by doing
things that
AFA Gary J way.
A2GS Mac, using shadowing for such small objects would actually slow
things down!!
LordRoland I think it was Matt who mentioned reading the actual Font Data.
LordRoland On the NET.
A2GS Yes, but do you know where that is in ROM?
LordRoland Nope.
LordRoland Anyone?
A2GS Well then your stuck doing it my way :)
LordRoland Educated guesses?
A2GS You can search for it using the monitor....
Mac Hater you can get the font handle and go from there...
LordRoland Stab in the dark?
LordRoland I'm on a Rom 02. Is it even in ROM?
A2GS First draw the font on the screen....look at the data from within
the monitor
AFA Gary J The font in ROM?
Dave Lyons Hey, you can *get* the font handle with GetFont.
A2GS and then search for a string of data in ROM which is identicle.
Dave Lyons That's not a problem.
A2GS Does that give the address of the FONT data in ROM?
Mac Hater you're doing something wrong Lord Roland, TML Pascal has a example
of a termina
Dave Lyons The *problem* is blasting it to the screen FASTER than QuickDraw
already does--you'll have
Mac Hater program that runs fine w/ tools. AWGS runs fine.
A2GS Are there headers that he'll have to look out for within the Font
table?
Dave Lyons to sacrifice some of the generality of QD to make it go
faster--like lost some clipping, or force
Dave Lyons it to be aligned to a byte or word in a certain way, etc.
Dave Lyons The font data may be in RAM or ROM...it depends.
Dave Lyons (And it doesn't matter much.)
A2GS Default Font will be in ROM.
LordRoland AWGS uses buffering. I really don't want that.
LordRoland The only TML Pascal I've seen runs slow, slow, slow.
CMOSness hi all
AFA Gary J Ok, It looks like we've run into a dead end on your question,
LordRoland.
AFA Gary J Anything else?
Dave Lyons Which TML was slow?
Dave Lyons TML Pascal II uses Text Edit & updates pretty fast. It does
suffer from some bugs in Text Edit
Dave Lyons itself, but the speed isn't the problem.
LordRoland Sorry. I was gone for a sec. V 1.5, dave.
Dave Lyons Yeah, definitely check out TML Pascal II 1.x.
Dave Lyons (done)
LordRoland OK. Thanks everyone. I'm thru. (DONE)
AFA Gary J Allright, let's move on to A2GS's question. GA A2
A2GS 2 off the wall questions, one.....
A2GS Anyone familiar with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and where
I can get
A2GS info on it?
A2GS GA
LordRoland Not a clue.
AFA Gary J GA, Scott :)
AFL Scott You can get information on OCR in several books I have that are
packed up
AFL Scott right now...(I'm moving)... I'll be glad to email you the
information once
LordRoland Mac had it in 1987 :(
AFL Scott I'm settled in my new home.
A2GS Where'd you move to?
A2GS (not my second Q :)
AFL Scott Reston, VA.
AFL Scott I haven't moved, yet... Done.
AFA Gary J GA with your comment, CMOSness
BillP Reston VA??? Who would live there??? :)
CMOSness I was just going to say that
CMOSness I remember a comp chronicals episode
CMOSness about that, and maybe you could get info
CMOSness thru them DONE.
A2GS Great, I'm looking for info on how to write routines.
Mac Hater you're moving with Scott also?
AFA Gary J (I'd think that you'd want to be FURTHER away from there, Scott
:)
A2GS Second Q.....
A2GS Anyone know if there are any advantages to using Huffman
compression as opposed
A2GS to LZW compression?
A2GS GA
LordRoland Check with Abaton for the OCR.
A2GS The scanner people?
LordRoland Yeah. They had a mac char. reader in Feb. 1987. I just happen to
have the
LordRoland ad in front of me.
A2GS So where's there II version???????????
A2GS :)
A2GS BTW Anyone able to answer my second Q?
LordRoland ?? Hack something together.
Mac Hater huffman can be faster. ga
AFA Gary J A2, as for compression routines, I know there are advantages and
disadvantages
AFA Gary J to either method, but don't recall the specifics.
A2GS Compressing or decompressing?
LordRoland Probably works through the serial port. Then use a DA to accept
the input.
Mac Hater decompression. lzw is faster if you search small series of bytes
but then data
Mac Hater is not always thoroughly compressed (repetetive graphics would
be).
A2GS Which is faster at decompressing?
LordRoland Probably costs alot, so maybe, you shouldn't HACK something
together.
A2GS What would cost alot?
AFA Gary J GA, CMOSness
LordRoland The OCR.
A2GS Why?
A2GS If it's software based.
LordRoland All Mac stuff is expensive. Plus, it's high tech stuff. Not
really, but...
CMOSness I was just wondering, A2, how does OCR fit into DL II (or does it
:)
A2GS It doesn't :) Just a pet project :)
LordRoland It isn't software based, I don't think.
CMOSness :)
AFA Gary J GA, DHackerott
DHackerott I'm also interested in OCR via ThunderScan
LordRoland No way, Hackerott.
DHackerott What input are you planning on?
LordRoland I really don't think it would work.
A2GS I'm interested VIA Quicky, but could also be applied to
Thunderscan!
AFA Gary J A2, why not put up something in the message boards. GA, Scott
AFL Scott Yes way... it's possible. You just have to write routines that
can match
AFL Scott bit patterns...with some error factoring... it's not that hard,
it's just
AFL Scott time consuming... Basically for each font you need to recognize
you need to
AFL Scott have an equivalent bitpattern in memory to match each character.
A2GS Exactly!
LordRoland What is the resolution of Thuderscan. 100 dpi tops.
A2GS There are a few hurdles which have to be overcome, it's not that
easy.
AFL Scott Done.
AFA Gary J Thanks, Scott.
A2GS I wouldn't use that technique....
A2GS NOT at all accurate.
AFL Scott How would YOU do it, then?
A2GS Unless you have a bitmap for every FONT in the world!
A2GS Hold on....
AFA Gary J That's what character recognition currently has to do, isn't
it?
AFL Scott Yup.
LordRoland Yeah. You need algorithms that'll work with most fonts.
A2GS I would use "Feature Analysis".
AFA Gary J GA, Marty
AFL Marty It's not necessarily the case that you'd need a bitmap for every
font
AFA Gary J (Most of the recognition stuff I'm familiar with works with a
limited type of
AFL Marty in the world...
AFA Gary J font and font size)
AFL Marty All you really need is a bitmap that is "close enough" in some
sense of
AFL Marty the word.
AFA Gary J Right, there should be margin for error
A2GS That doesn't offer very much flexibility.
AFL Marty For example, we can recognize the letter "x" in a wide variety of
fonts...
AFA Gary J GA, Bill
BillP yea but...
BillP won't we have outline fonts on the GS soon anyway. :)
BillP ga
AFL Marty not because we have memorized the fonts, but because there are
elements
AFL Marty of the character that identify it as being an x.
AFL Marty done
A2GS It's easier seen and recognized by the human eye then by an
algorithm!
AFL Marty I never said it was easy.
AFA Gary J GA, Roland
LordRoland I heard that we don't have the clock speed for Outline fonts.
A2GS That's where Feature Analysis comes in.
AFL Scott Explain feature analysis?
AFA Gary J GA, Scott
A2GS I've heard a lot of things which wren't true about the IIGS !!!
A2GS Most weren't true!
A2GS Feature Analysis....
A2GS Basically you define a character from the alphabet by the lines
and curves
A2GS which make it up...
A2GS Ex. the letter "A" is made up of 2 diagonal lines plus one
horizontal line.
LordRoland Does anyone know anyone called Harlock (AO name, of course)?
LordRoland Sorry to interrupt!
A2GS The letter "D" is made up of one vertical line and one half
loop.
A2GS Done.
A GibberFC Unless it is block lettering... then it has 2 vertical and 2
horizonal
A GibberFC ga
A2GS Exactly.
AFA Gary J GA, Scott
AFL Scott Exactly... I think we said that... Marty did, I know... not in so
many words..
AFA Gary J Right.
AFL Scott however, you have to store the features somewhere... and vectors
wouldn't
A2GS I'm just trying to point out that using bitmaps is very
inefficient.
LordRoland Bitmaps won't work.
LordRoland Well.
DHackerott Has anyone actually used QUICKIE yet? Does it really, really
work?
AFL Scott be a good choice, IMHO. So how do you plan on defining the
choices?
AFL Marty I don't recall anyone arguing that they were efficient.
AFL Dyfet (I had some nasty modem problems tonight :()
AFL Marty Hi Dave!
AFA Gary J GA, Gibber
A2GS I've used Quickie....
A GibberFC ack.... ga
A2GS Defining what choices?
LordRoland My dealer has one. I was pretty suprised.
AFL Scott For the characters you plan on recognizing? Vectors, angles...
what?
AFA Gary J GA, Marty
LordRoland Hey, I gotta go. Thanks everyone.
A2GS Can't use angles (much to complicated and not very useful).....
AFA Gary J Goodnight, Roland.
AFL Marty Couldn't you store the bitmap of a "generic" font? Then compare
the image of
A2GS Plan to use vectors or something related to it....it's the
algorithms that
AFL Marty the scanned font to that of the stored one and if "most" of the
points...
A2GS are difficult to come up with...so I'm looking for some OCR books
for
A2GS some suggestions.
AFL Marty are "close enough" to some character in the stored font, you have
a match.
A2GS Marty, What do you do when there's a wide range in FONT sizes?
A2GS Feature Analysis solves this problem and is VERY flexible.
Coach101 I think you have all missed on of the basic starting
problems....
Coach101 1) You have no idea what is horizontal and what is vertical.
But
AFL Marty I dunno. I'm just tossing out ideas as they pop into my head.
Coach101 you probably know its not pure x or pure y!
A2GS That's what the algorithms are for :)
Coach101 Two, the old brain very quickly defined a line for you.. Your
program
AFL Marty If I were doing the project, I'd do it for one font size and
AFL Marty improve it from there.
Coach101 is going to have to figure out all of that stuff before even
looking
Coach101 for a character!
A2GS Why is that?
A2GS One of the main algorithms (besides helping with character
definitions) is to
A2GS locate a character.
A2GS All OCR programs follow the same general rules for locating and
defining a
AFA Gary J GA, Scott
A2GS character....
AFL Scott Not necessary, Coach.. if an approximation map is "taught" to the
software and
A2GS I just want to know how they do it :)
Tamira brb
AFL Scott the software has an Orientation option, the main task of the
scanning software
Mac Hater y=mx+b bye all :)
A2GS My guess is that you have to scan the screen for a black pixel on
a white
AFL Scott would be to only filter those bits which are below a certain
threshold. After
A2GS screen and from that determine the size and loaction of the
character.
A2GS Working from the black pixel on.
AFL Scott that, the approximation map, or better yet, mask could be used to
to tell
AFA Gary J Sounds like a slow process to me.
AFL Scott what character is present... it's not fast... That's why most OCR
equipment
AFL Scott does this all on board and just feeds ascii text to a host.
AFL Scott The key is the scanner... it's got to be accurate.
AFL Scott Done.
A2GS Nobody said it was fast or easy....but I don't think it's that
slow...
Coach101 YEs, I have seen some very good results out of Kurtzweil
equipment...
Coach101 But, the context is very important. The stuff I have played
around
A2GS I think an entire page of text (1000 - 2000 characters) could be
converted
Coach101 with on PCs did not have a strong enought concept of context and
would
A2GS into ASCII in under 10 seconds....
A2GS and that's a hell of a lot faster then typeing in the entire
page!
Coach101 change things like Entry_Point to Entry-(&&(&( That is, if
shifted its
Coach101 line too quickly because it did not know waht aline was... ga
A2GS I've seen the results of using the Quickie and I think it's
possible to do...
A2GS but we'll never know till someone tries.
A2GS Done (finally) !
DHackerott Impatienlty awaiting to beta test for you!
Coach101 :)