Bug#564710: RFP: canvas -- reads draw commands and executes them

[Siward de Groot <siward@ziggo.nl>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
X-Debbugs-CC: debian-devel@lists.debian.org

Hello everyone,

Canvas is a program that works with X ;
it creates a window with a white background, and then waits for draw commands.
These commands are read from a local socket,
 and there is also a commandline  utility ('canvassock')
 that sends it's argument unto that socket.
Commands can be 'drawline 10 10 100 100', 'setdrawcolor 255 0 0 0', etc.
When canvas gets the commands, it executes them.
Result can be saved to a file (you can create .imo, .jpg, or .png images).

Canvas is most suited for using from a script or program,
 and can thus also be used to make simple animations.
It can also be used interactively,
 because it can report events (as text strings).
It can also draw texts.
It's main image buffer is present in filesystem as an mmapped shared file,
 so you can manipulate it any way you want.

Using canvas is extremely easy to learn ;
It comes with an html file  that describes everything
 and that can be read in 10 minutes.
It also comes with example code for using it from C or Perl.

It is written in C, and the code is fairly clean and simple,
 and not large (190 kB).
I wrote it on Debian, and compiled latest version on unstable,
 so there should be no problem in packaging it.

I think it should be in Debian because it is very usefull and easy :
 it can draw anything that you can compute,
 and all you need to know are simple drawcommands like 'drawline'.

I hope someone will package it,
because i wrote it after i did not find any Debian package that could draw what 
i needed.

Copyright is GPLv3 with additional requirement that you are not allowed to 
pretend you wrote it.

Please take a minute to read it's html documentation (has nice drawings !)
which can be found on http://www.gransi.com/siward/canvas4/doc/Intro.html .

It's source code can also be found there, at
 http://www.gransi.com/siward/canvas4/canvas4.tar.gz .


Thanks for taking time to read this message,
and have a nice day :-)

Siward de Groot