The Bézier Drawing Program began as an attempt to emulate something my daughter had been doing for a number of years, making Christmas cards and birthday cards using various geometrical constructions superimposed on each other, usually with a radial symmetry, to produce intricate and interesting designs. I decided to try to do the same thing on a computer, and began with standard shapes like hyperbolas, ellipses, polygons, and vaguely teardrop-like shapes, always enclosed upon each other so they could be filled with color. The emphasis was on being able to manipulate the objects with a mouse, clone the objects easily, and produce radial symmetry about a centre point. The original intent was to produce a monochrome wireframe display which could be printed at high resolution, and perhaps colored by hand after printing. Subsequently the following changes in scope were made :
  The word Bézier is used in the program title because the drawing is done using Bézier curves. The Bézier curves are spliced together in various ways to produce the desired object. These curves are the standard tool used in vector graphics, and they make it possible to export the images to file formats such as SVG. Since B
ézier curves are used, the resulting shapes are not absolutely true 'hyperbolas' or 'trochoids'; however, in most cases you would be hard-pressed to tell the difference.

    To view an example of B
ézier curves by Pierre himself, click here.

    The program is written in Java, distributed as a .jar file, with a help file called BezierDraw.chm, and should be runnable on any platform.



    This project is hosted on Launchpad.
    Launchpad supports bug reports , as well as a question and answer section.