History Lists Step 6

Step 6: The restaurant at the end of the Universe.

"So, that's the History List eh? Hum, pretty good, it may actually come in handy someday" I hear you murmur. Well, get set for a really big finale. The Corel Photo-Paint History List is much, much more. It is really a very cleaver way of recording a script. Yes, even if you do not deliberately set up the script recorder to create a script, The History List is doing it for you all the time, ... both backwards and forwards. Not only that, the history list can save you MEGABYTES in image file sizes! "How is that possible?" I hear you ask. Santa really did come to Photo-Paint users.

6a: "He's reading the list, Checking it twice..."

Click the Undo List icon on the Toolbar to bring up the Undo History List dialog box.

Click the ‘Save' button. If you have not altered the location of the scripts autosave folder you should see two folders in the save dialog box that opens after you click ‘Save'. If so, double click the scripts folder, name the file something like ‘history list UNDO' and save it. If you have changed the location of the scripts save pointer and you would like the script to appear in the default Photo-Paint scripts list, then locate the folder Photopnt/Scripts/Scripts and save it there. After saving the file, click ‘Cancel' on the Undo List dialog box to close it.

If you haven't already done so, open the scripts area on the docker by selecting View/Dockers/Scripts from the menu bar, then click the scripts tag on the docker. Double click the scripts folder to open it then locate the file you just saved.

After locating the file, right-click on its icon and select ‘Edit script'. The Photo-Paint script editor will then open. As you can clearly see, the saved Undo History List is a true Corel script, properly formatted with identifying headers etc. The script may be edited if you desire.

6b. Back to the Future Part 2.

Right, lets get dangerous again.

Click the Undo List icon to bring up the Undo List dialog box.

Scroll to the top of the list and select the first entry, then click Undo. All of our actions are completely undone again. The Undo list and Undo icons turn gray while the Redo and Redo List icons become coloured.

Click the Redo List icon to open the Redo History List dialog box. Click ‘Save', name the file something like ‘history list REDO', locate the correct folder if necessary (although you shouldn't have to now), then click ‘Save' again and then ‘Cancel' to close the redo list dialog box.

Now we have saved both the Undo History List and the Redo History List. "That's odd", I hear you say, "Aren't they the same ?"

6c. Scrooge M^cFile has a Merry Christmas.

Almost done. Now that we have saved our History Lists it is safe to save our image without fear of losing all our actions. First though, we must recreate our image.

Click the Redo List icon on the Toolbar, scroll to the bottom of the list, select the last entry then click ‘Redo'. Amazing isn't it, and fast!. We now have our image back.

Save the image (File/Save...) in .cpt format into your favourite location using your favourite name. After saving, observe the gray colour of all the undo/redo icons on the Toolbar. Gone are all our actions. However, the purpose of saving the image was not really to keep it, rather, to inspect it.

Open Explorer (Windows), and locate the file which was just saved. Note the file size. Mine says 1,729Kb. Too much for a floppy. What would you say if I told you I had the ability to save thousands of such images on a single 1.44 Mb floppy disk? You would probably think I was totally mad!. You may well be right, even if I can show you how.

6d. "Madness takes control... Lets do the Time Warp again."

OK, OK, Don't all rush me at once! Whoa! Get that straight jacket outta here!. Well, here's how it is done:

Close the image we just saved. Yes, start with a blank Photo-Paint screen.

Make sure you have the Corel Photos CD (the one we used as our original image source) still in the drive and the Scripts Docker visible.

Double click the file we made earlier for the REDO list. Ah-ha!, got an error I see. All right, try the script we saved for the UNDO list. Wow, watch it go. Click the message button after the original image opens and then watch the speed of this thing. Really fast! Thus, providing you have the original image CD available, the UNDO saved script will even reopen the image file we choose to create our masterpiece!

Try this.

To show that this is no trick nor that our image is not merely being collected from a saved temporary file or clipboard entry, completely close Photo-Paint, even turn the computer off if you like, then restart Photo-Paint. Start with a completely blank application but ensure you have the correct CD in the drive.

Double click the UNDO script again (Scripts Docker) and it will recreate the same image again.

Check the file size of the .csc script file. Mine is 3K in size and thus I could put about 480,000 such files on a single floppy disk and I would only need to carry the original image source CD Rom with me.

But who wants to make up 480,000 of the same image, or worse, recreate a different script each time we need a different startup image. Remember the error in the file we encountered when we tried to run the REDO history script? For reasons unknown to me (at this stage), the REDO history script requires that we load an image prior to running the script. Therefore, we can use ANY image.

Try the next step.

Open a different image to begin with. I used 754086.wi from the Photos/Backgrds folder on disk 3 of the Corel 8 set.

Double click (run) the REDO history script we previously saved. Now it works! (Figure 10).



*Figure 10. Using the REDO History List script on a different image.*


	This script requires an initial image to operate on, but actually provides a much more flexible solution. This script can be run on ANY image, since we have included an initial image resample action right at the start.

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