The Drawing Canvas

The Drawing Canvas consists of the drawing area, a control bar and a status line:

Control Bar

  • Show Editor switches to the Graph Editor.
  • Draw Fractal starts drawing the fractal in the drawing area. Clicking on the button while drawing the fractal ends the drawing.
  • The Iteration Selection lets you choose the number of iterations (between 1 and 10). Alternativly you can decrease (<) or increase (>) the number of iterations by clicking on the small buttons to the left and right. This will change the iteration number and immediately start drawing.
  • The Threshold Selection lets you set the threshold value (0, 1, 2, 5, 10).
    At some point the segments of the resulting graph can get very small. In fact, they can be smaller than a pixel on your computer screen. Because it makes not much sense, to iterate further on these tiny segments (it only takes time and does not allways affect the appearance of the fractal), you have the option to set a threshold value. If the length of a segment in pixels is smaller than the threshold value, iteration stops for this segment.
  • If the Predraw checkbox is checked, a fractal with iterations-1 is drawn in red before the actual fractal is drawn on top of it. This makes it easy to understand how the segments are replaced between two iteration steps.

Drawing Area

The drawing area is where the fractal is drawn. Enlarging the Fractaline window enlarges also the drawing area and makes it possible to get a better picture of the fractal.

Status Line

After a fractal is drawn, the status line displays the length of the fractal.
Note, that only the actual drawn lines on the screen count to the length. This means, that a threshold value other than 0 may influence the result.

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Fractaline was created by Peter Laubender - Last update on Sunday, March 28 1999