Arabeske - menus

Reference: menus

This page is not likely to be useful quite often. Arabeske only has a few simple menus, but some precisions might help.

>New: Creates a new blank pattern. If necessary, suggest saving the current work.

Open: Opens a file in .ara format. If necessary, suggest saving the current work.

Save as...: Saves the current pattern. A file selector prompts for the file location.

Save: Saves the current pattern. If it has not been saves yet, prompts for the file location.

Recent >: A sub-menu allows direct opening of the 5 most recently opened patterns.

Export>: A sub-menu allows exporting the current pattern using one of the available output formats:Portable Network Graphics (PNG), Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), POV-Ray.

Reload Images: Updates every external image used in the current pattern. This functions allows to take into account the changes made to them while working at the current pattern within Arabeske, without needing to fully reload the pattern.

Quit: Exits Arabeske.

Snapshot>: Currently, Arabeske does not have the mandatory undo feature. Before any risky operation, you have two ways to protect your work. The first, obvious one, is to save it, but you might not wish to overwrite your previous version, or to start managing several files. The snapshot command allows you to temporarily store different stages of your work in memory.
By clicking New, a copy of your pattern in its current state is done, and can be reffered to from the snapshot menu, by selecting the time when it was created.
It is possible to browse between several snapshots to get back to a previous state. However, the changes done after the latest snapshot was taken are not automatically recorded. If you have changed your work and just want to open a previous version for comparison, you must first take a snapshot including your latest changes, to be able to restore them later.
There can be a virtually infinite number of snapshots in memory, which are kept during the whole Arabeske session, but are never stored to disk.

About: Tells a bit more about Arabeske.

Upgrade: Opens a small window and attempts to connect to Arabeske web site. If the connexion succeeds, the window reports the latest available versions, both stable and in development. If needed, you just have to go and fetch your favourite upgrade.

Demo: Simple demonstration pattern.

Lucie's demo: This demo pattern is nothing but an image created by my daughter when she was 6 or 7. This shows Arabeske is not a "complicated texture editor"!