The Programming Tool Edgar


Table of Contents


L. Mariaux, D. Muller
Centre de Genie Electrique de Lyon
Ecole Centrale de Lyon

Other applications or tools from this site: mWave, mField

To the list of Colos tools


1. Global Description

Edgar stands for "EDitable Graphics Area".

Edgar is a Motif widget to display, edit and animate graphics. This widget is able to display various classes of objects, which are internally defined using the same kind of object-orientedness as the X toolkit uses to define the concept of a widget.

The objects actually available are polyline, polygon, rectangle, circle, text and pixmap, which may be either interactively or programmatically created, destroyed, moved, resized, rotated or grouped.

2. Scope of Programming Work

When Motif is lacking any tool in the domain of graphics, Edgar provides high level primitives for anyone who needs static, interactive or animated graphics.

Edgar completely hides the user from low-level X structures like colour maps and graphics contexts.

3. Target group and Minimum Expertise Needed as Prerequisite

Edgar is intended to be used by Motif programmers.

4. Available Help

A technical paper and a Programmer's Reference manual of 85 pages including example programs using the Edgar widget, are currently available.

5. Status

Edgar is now a stable product even if subjected to improvements suggested by the users.

Internal data structures have been designed to optimize performance (for animation applications), and to allow easy extension (for very interactive applications like editors, which will need object class browsers or interactive object resource specifications).

Edgar is written in C and conforms to industrial standards X-Window (X11R5) and Motif (1.2) which guarantees easy porting to most Unix platforms.

6. Evaluation

Edgar is actually used by the Lyon COLOS Team inside of applications like mField and mWave presented elsewhere.

It will be beta-tested on a private ftp server by up to 15 european companies and universities between November `93 and April `94. It will be sold using that same server after April `94.