Originally developed by several Cold-War-Era defense programs, the Spir-O-Matic technology has been repurposed by Mark Johnston for the manufacture the highest quality line art. Art produced with Spir-O-Matic fully complies with the ISO-17667 and IS0-9844 line art standards. By adhereing to these stringent specification, Spir-O-Matic art is suitable for the most demanding applications and environmental conditions. The proprietary Spir-O-Matic process relies on a two dimensional outline shape being rotated, translated, or scaled in three dimensional space. Residue trails left by the moving outline accumulate over time, and reliably produce art with a tolerance of less than .0124 µm. Spir-O-Matic is optimized for 16-bit color, and functions best on Pentium and PowerPC class machines.

Warning: All buttons with an inset border will erase the previously accumulated drawing. Scrolling the browser window will also erase the drawing. If you like what you've got already, avoid the "NO TRAILS", "CLEAR" and "BACK" buttons, and don't scroll down to read these instructions.

Instructions

Clicking in the drawing window
A fast click of the mouse in the drawing window will recenter the object at the point clicked.

Clicking in the drawing window and then keeping the mouse button depressed without moving the cursor will cause the outline shape to move towards the cursor.

Clicking and draging in the drawing window will rotate the object about the x and y-axes.

Rotating the outline shape
The top block of controls determine the rotation of the outline shape. The top set of two buttons controls rotation about the x-axis, the middle set the y-axis, and the bottom set the z-axis. The x-axis is oriented left to right. The y-axis is oriented up and down. And the z-axis is oriented in and out of the monitor. The longer a rotation button is depressed the faster the rotation will be about that axis.

Stop the rotation on all axes with the STOP button, and resume the same rotation with the START button. Rotation about the x and y-axes can also be imparted by clicking and dragging in the drawing window.

Scaling the outline shape
The buttons on either side of SCALE determine the size of the outline shape. The left arrow shrinks the outline shape. The right arrow expands the outline shape.The longer a scale button is depressed the more the scale will change.

If an off-center shape is created, scaling it to large size may move it off screen and out of sight.

Moving the outline shape
The buttons surrounding MOVE change the position of outline shape. The object will move as long as a button is depressed. An object can also be repositioned on the screen by clicking the cursor anywhere in the drawing window. Clicking in the drawing window and then keeping the mouse button down without moving the cursor will cause the outline shape to move towards the cursor.

Clearing the screen
The CLEAR button deletes everything from the drawing window, and resets the object to start from a standard orientation.

Turning trails off and on
The NO TRAILS / TRAILS button turns the trails off and on. Clicking the NO TRAILS causes the outline shape to stop leaving a trail. NOTE: Clicking NO TRAILS button also deletes everything from the drawing window.

Clicking the TRAILS button causes the outline shape to start leaving a trail.

Making a new outline shape
The NEW SHAPE button allows you to create a new outline shape with up to 16 vertex points. Clicking in the drawing window connects the dots to form a new outline. Click the DONE button when the outline is finished. If the new outline shape is positioned away from the center of the drawing window, it's center of gravity will be off-center. This fact can be used to generate torii and other open 3D forms. NOTE: outline shapes with many vertices will draw more slowly, especially on older PC's.

Changing colors
The bottom two buttons control the colors of Spir-O-Matic. The FORE button determines the color of the outline object and the color of the trails it will leave. Because transparency is used to calculate overlapping colors, there may be times in 8-bit video when the shape may not show up until another color is selected.

The BACK button determines the color of the background. NOTE:Changing the background color always erases the current drawing.

Saving Spir-O-Matic images
Save a Spir-O-Matic drawing by taking a screen-shot.

On Window's PCs, pressing "alt-Print Screen" will save the current browser window to the clipboard. Using any graphics program (PC Paint etc.) it is possible to paste the clipboard screen-shot into a new document and then further crop the document down to the 328 X 328 Spir-O-Matic size.

On Macintosh, pressing "command-shift-3" will save a PICT of the entire screen to your boot disk. This file can opened in any graphics program and cropped down to the 328 x 328 Spir-O-Matic size.