Latest update Dec 19, 2022

A Simple Graphics Editor

One or two persons, level of ambition accordingly. Experience with .NET GUI programming is a clear advantage.

In this project you will implement a simple editor for 2D graphics. The graphics consists of geometrical 2D figures placed on a surface. The editor should have at least these features:

• it should have (at least) squares and circles as 2D objects,
• it should be possible to create, move, and delete 2D objects, and
• overlapping 2D objects should be possible to move upwards or downwards.

• 2D objects should have colours. There should be at least eight colors to choose from. A colour should be set when an object is created,
• editing objects: resizing, changing color, and
• ability to save a scene with objects to a file, and to read a saved file into the editor. This means that you must invent and implement a textual format for 2D objects and scenes.

The interested student may extend the project in a number of ways, including adding more shapes, introducing connectors between shapes, adding text boxes, etc.

The code should be "functional style", which means that the use of side-effects should be minimized. You will need to somehow keep the state of the 2D graphics scene, of course. Think carefully about which kind of data structure(s) you will need to represent the scene, and design your editing operations on the scene as functions on this data structure.

It is important that your report contains a decent "user manual" for your editor (unless it is very self-explanatory), so it becomes easy for us to test it.

Hints: You need to gather some information about GUI programming in .NET. Sections 8 and 11 in the previous course book Don Syme, Adam Granicz, Antonio Cisternino: Expert F# 2.0 give a good account for windows and event handling in F#. The book does, however, not say a whole lot about how to use geometrical shapes, and colours: it merely gives a few examples. The namespace System.Drawing contains a number of useful data types and operations. This is really a general .NET namespace: online documentation is found here.