Dan Harkless' "shapes" Icon

Date:  

March 1, 2002

Tools:  

Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7.04 and Microsoft Paint 5.0 on a Dell Precision 330 running Windows 2000

Info:  

I couldn't find a good icon online to represent "Draw program images", so I drew this. This really should have been doable using only Paint Shop Pro, but some time after version 4, Jasc added vector capability (à la true draw programs) to their Shapes tool, and the rasterization totally sucks. It's not possible to draw arbitrarily small shapes and have them be symmetrical. This is pretty inexcusable considering how many decades ago the algorithms for perfect rasterization were developed...

In any case, I had to use Microsoft Paint to draw the circle. Paint doesn't have a triangle tool, however, so I used PSP's, then pasted it into Paint, erased the irregular lines, leaving only the three corner points, and then connected them with properly rasterized lines (actually PSP probably could have done this step) and pasted the result back into my PSP canvas. The rectangle was the only shape PSP's Preset Shapes tool was able to rasterize properly.

The original version of this GIF was transparent, but I changed the background to be white when I converted my website to "dark mode".