# e-Picture Documentation Introduction

## Introduction

e-Picture is a powerful tool for creating static and animated web graphics. First time users should read the brief overview below to become familiar with the general structure of e-Picture.

Documentation is available in the following forms:

- The General Structure of e-Picture
- On-line Documentation
- Instructional Examples (see the Examples folder)

## The General Structure of e-Picture

e-Picture is a graphics application specially built to facilitate the creation and maintenance of dynamic web graphics. It is unique in its ability to mix vector and bitmap graphics with very little regard to which is which. This provides numerous advantages, including greater flexibility when creating objects and applying effects.

Like other graphics products, in e-Picture you draw on a canvas using a tool from the toolbox. The tool you select can be either a bitmap tool, such as the paint brush, or a vector tool, such as the rectangle tool -- the beauty is that you can use either type of tool at any time. All items drawn on your canvas in e-Picture are referred to as objects.

When you click on a tool in the toolbox, the Tool Inspector for that tool is shown in the Inspector panel. From the Inspector panel, you can change numerous qualities of the tool selected. For most tools, you will find these qualities organized under two tabs, Stroke and Fill (tools such as the paint brush and the line tool without fill qualities only present the Stroke tab). The Stroke tab applies to the outline of the object; the Fill tab to the contents of the object. Both Stroke and Fill have their own color palettes and other attributes, so you can have a gradient for the fill, and a pattern for the stroke...if you so desire!

As you draw objects on the screen, a new entry is made in the Objects panel for each object. Any object may be edited even after several other objects have been created. To edit an object, simply double-click on the object in the Objects panel. The Tool Inspector mentioned above is also used to change the attributes of existing objects, so you would use this same inspector to make any changes to the object. You can also apply filters, effects and perform other manipulations from the Objects panel.

Layers are used to contain sets of objects. Layers are maintained in the Layers panel. From the Layers panel, you can perform standard layer operations, such as layer creation and deletion, as well as apply filters to layers, etc.

The Animation panel is used to generate animated GIFs (and later, much much more!). Animation frames (numbered 1 to n) can contain any object in any layer. You can animate your objects or layers via opacity changes, object transformations, filters, or any combination of the above.

Please see the on-line beta documentation for more information on e-Picture concepts, and the Examples folder for start to finish examples of how to perform common tasks with e-Picture.