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George overview

What is George?​

George is a programming language which allows you to use the numerous tools of TVPaint Animation. Every program written in this language is called “George Script”. Other softwares use sometimes the word “Macro” instead of “Script”.

A George Script allows you to execute specific TVPaint Animation command such as : Create a new layer, draw a circle on this area, save the current project, add a bookmark, etc…

Those Scripts are usually created to save some time when executing a repetitive task is needed. Experienced programmers use TVPaint Animation commands in order to create “.dll ” plug-ins

Some George Scripts are available as example with the software, but you can also create your own scripts and/or exchange them with members of the TVPaint Community (you can access the TVPaint forum here).

Editing and executing George scripts​

George scripts can be located anywhere in your computer.

Those George Scripts are in fact usual ASCII text files and have a “.grg” extension. It is possible to edit or create them with any text editor like Notepad from Microsoft Windows, Text Edit from macOS or Gedit from Linux.

The scripts are in theory working on PC, Macintosh or Linux, whatever the computer used to create them.

To use one of the George Scripts at your disposal, just follow the steps below:

  • Open a custom panel
  • Create a new button on this panel
  • Select the action: -Set script- for this button
  • Select a file with a “.grg” extension in the file requester

Once finished, if you click on the just created button, the George Script will then be launched.

At every moment, you can stop the execution of a George Script by using the [Esc] key. A window, indicating on which line the execution of the script was stopped, should popup.

Once a George Script has finished its programmed tasks, the Undo option of the TVPaint Animation main panel allows you to cancel all the changes it has generated.

Programming with George​

George is a scripting language which can do the basics:

  • Loops (do the same thing n times),
  • Conditional testing (if this is true then do that),
  • Computations (a+b, sin(a),...).

The George language is not particularly fast, but it is flexible and very easy to use. On many points, George is comparable to the Pascal language or other well known programming language. However it’s not aimed at developing heavyweight applications as are for example the C or C++ languages. George is first and foremost a scripting language.