Welcome to the Box project!¶
Introduction¶
Box(er) is made by two equally important components:
- a programming language, Box, designed with vector graphics in mind,
- a graphical user interface, Boxer, which allows you to edit the Box program and - at the same time - see the figure, zoom in and out, interact with it, browse the documentation interactively.
The aim of the project is hence to maintain the ease-of-use offered by mouse-driven graphical editors, adding - on top of it - the customizability which only a powerful dedicated programming language can provide. Below you find a screenshot of latest version of Boxer.
The small squares are “reference points” for the figure. They can be moved using the mouse and can be used in the Box source as pre-set variables. This way, it is possible to use the mouse to interact directly with the Box source.
Features¶
Box provides most of the features needed to create quality pictures and figures. Box has the following advantages over traditional GUI graphics editors:
- Smart figures: while you can still see what you draw and interact with it as in traditional vector graphics editors, you can also add custom code to make your figures “smart”,
- Reusability: you can reuse your past figures just via cut & paste from other Box programs,
- Flexibility: you always draw things in Window objects. You can then translate, rotate, scale and put such Window objects inside other Window objects,
- Powerful tools: Transformation matrices can be calculated automatically from constraints given by the user,
- Flexible syntax: don’t need to declare variables when redundant, don’t need to put semicolons everywhere, don’t need to give function parameters in a precise order just for the sake of it, use default values as needed (you can specify many parameters, but you don’t have to)...
- Customizability: you can base your figure on a set of variables which you define at the beginning. Changing colors, line sizes, shapes and styles is then a matter of seconds...
- Being a programming language, Box allows you to draw fractal pictures and Boxer allows you to interact with them!
Box has also the following features:
- you can save your figures to EPS, PDF, PNG and SVG. You can hence load your SVG figure with Inkscape and continue to work with the latter, if you prefer.
- translucency, radial and linear color gradients, lines with variable width,
- Box compiles under Linux, Mac and Windows. Source code is provided for UNIX like OSes, while a zip archive (containing the executable) is available for Windows.
