2-D Object standard format FORM DR2D Description by Ross Cunniff and John Orr A standard IFF FORM to describe 2D drawings has been sorely needed for a long time. Several commercial drawing packages have been available for some time but none has established its file format as the Amiga standard. The absence of a 2D drawing standard hinders the development of applications that use 2D drawings as it forces each application to understand several private standards instead of a single one. Without a standard, data exchange for both the developer and the user is difficult, if not impossible. The DR2D FORM fills this void. This FORM was developed by Taliesin, Inc. for use as the native file format for their two-dimensional structured drawing package, ProVector. Saxon Industries and Soft Logik Publishing Corporation are planning to support this new FORM in the near future. Many of the values stored in the DR2D FORM are stored as IEEE single precision floating point numbers. These numbers consist of 32 bits, arranged as follows: _______________________________________________________________________ | s e e e e e e e | e m m m m m m m | m m m m m m m m | m m m m m m m m | ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 31 24 23 16 15 8 7 0 where: s is the sign of the number where 1 is negative and 0 is positive. e is the 8 bit exponent in excess 127 form. This number is the power of two to which the mantissa is raised (Excess 127 form means that 127 is added to the exponent before packing it into the IEEE number.) m is the 23 bit mantissa. It ranges from 1.0000000 to 1.999999..., where the leading base-ten one is assumed. An IEEE single precision with the value of 0.0000000 has all its bits cleared. the dr2d chunks simple dr2d example ofnt form