Outline Plan

Ok, well time is ticking on and although I have had a brief play with Processing, I have not made any progress on my fragment. I am promising myself that I am going to do just a little bit each day on it, that way it will not get in the way too much with my day-to-day stuff.

The place to start is with an outline plan! Here's what I am going to write:

• Brief preamble, reassuring the reader that the curve functions are simple.
• Present a very simple example, one line "program".
• Start off by explaining what an arc is, that there are 2pi radians in a circle. Explain what an ellipse is.
• Very simple example: draw an arc.
• Explain properly what the arguments in the arc function do. I won't make it as formal as in a programming textbook.
• Cover the constants for pi, and two different "ellipse modes".
• Give a good example, or relate the parameters of arc() to the example shown earlier.
• Explain that arc() is an alternative to the ellipse() function and can be used to draw arcs and complete ellipses and circles.
• Cover the fill, thickness effects etc (need to read up on this).
• Show a program of 30 lines which does some effect were arcs are drawn repeatedly and the angle is changed - as well as the size of the circle.
• Talk about the limitations of the arc function. Some people might naively think that an arc can do any type of curve; perhaps I ought to talk about a simple counter-example.