Artist is an Emacs lisp package that allows you to draw lines,
rectangles and ellipses by using your mouse and/or keyboard. The
shapes are made up with the ascii characters |, -, / and \.

Features are:

* Intersecting: When a `|' intersects with a `-', a `+' is
  drawn, like this:   |         \ /
                    --+--        X 
                      |         / \

* Rubber-banding: When drawing lines you can interactively see the
  result while holding the mouse button down and moving the mouse.  If
  your machine is not fast enough (a 386 is a bit too slow, but a
  pentium is well enough), you can turn this feature off.  You will
  then see 1's and 2's which mark the 1st and 2nd endpoint of the line
  you are drawing.

* Arrows: After having drawn a (straight) line or a (straight)
  poly-line, you can set arrows on the line-ends by typing < or >.

* Flood-filling: You can fill any area with a certain character by
  flood-filling.

* Cut copy and paste: You can cut, copy and paste rectangular
  regions. Artist also interfaces with the rect package (this can be
  turned off if it causes you any trouble) so anything you cut in
  artist can be yanked with C-x r y and vice versa.
  
* Drawing with keys: Everything you can do with the mouse, you can
  also do without the mouse.

* Aspect-ratio: You can set the variable artist-aspect-ratio to
  reflect the height-width ratio for the font you are using. Squares
  and circles are then drawn square/round.  Note, that once your
  ascii-file is shown with font with a different height-width ratio,
  the squares won't be square and the circles won't be round.

* Drawing operations: The following drawing operations are implemented:

    lines		straight-lines
    rectangles		squares
    poly-lines		straight poly-lines
    ellipses		circles
    text (see-thru)	text (overwrite)
    spray-can		setting size for spraying
    vaporize line	vaporize lines
    erase characters	erase rectangles

  Straight lines are lines that go horizontally, vertically or
  diagonally. Plain lines go in any direction. The operations in
  the right column are accessed by holding down the shift key while
  drawing.

  It is possible to vaporize (erase) entire lines and connected lines
  (rectangles for example) as long as the lines being vaporized are
  straight and connected at their endpoints. Vaporizing is inspired
  by the drawrect package by Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@poboxes.com>.

* Picture mode compatibility: Artist is picture mode compatible (this
  can be turned off).


The latest version of Artist is available from
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~tab/artist/

To install Artist on your system, follow the directions in the file
`INSTALL'.


Send bug reports and comments (and perhaps even your ascii-creations
drawn with artist :-) to tab@lysator.liu.se.
