Seems possible but I cannot get one to display on the Form
- myshape.visible := True;
- myshape.show

These do not work.   Any suggestions would be appreciated.

TIA
George.

     end;
   end;

  Make notice of */ as comment. double / will make a wierd note

  from the above example you can modify your component.

      Left:=10; // make your own
      Top:=10; // make your own

Thanks!  Hopefully you have another suggestion...
Because I need to position the shapes, I set Top, Left, H & W and use
BringToFront, SendToBack.   Works fine, but now after putting a few
overlapping
shapes on the form when I change their size and position I see very annoying
flickering.

I have tried a number of things.
- changing the creation order,
- speeding up and slowing down (via timer) the changing of properties
- setting component style to opaque
- writing the property values only when any have changed

Ideally what I want to do is suppress painting at the component level during
shape
property adjustments and subsequently have the entire window repainted in
one
pass.  After that I want to turn on normal painting again.

My most desperate act was to try and intercept the WM_PAINT in the
WndProc and conditionally repaint by using another timer.  I suspect this
may contain the answer  but I ran into a strange side-effect, likely caused
by my ignorance of default windows msg processing (exhibited in the
following code
fragment)- immediately after setting DoPaint := False elswhere, the msg is
intercepted OK but all timers stop working - no ONTIMER events fire!

procedure TWebDeskForm.WndProc(var Message: TMessage);
var
 i : Integer;
begin

 if Message.Msg =  WM_PAINT then
 begin
   if bDoPaint = False then
      exit; // divert it
 end;
 inherited WndProc(Message);
end;

Renate

Referring to your original message, rather than overriding the WndProc
as a whole, I'd only override the form's paint, something like this:

procedure TForm1.Paint;
begin
  if dbDoPaint then
  inherited;
end;

Maybe some of this helps.

Renate

procedure TFormPaintBrush.DrawShape(TopLeft, BottomRight: TPoint; AMode:
TPenMode);
var
   rcRect : TPaintStruct;
begin
   BeginPaint(Image.Canvas.Handle,rcRect);
 with Image.Canvas do
 begin
  Pen.Mode := AMode;
  case DrawingTool of
   dtLine: begin
    MoveTo(TopLeft.x, TopLeft.y);
    LineTo(BottomRight.x, BottomRight.y);
   end;
   dtDelete: begin
...........//some code
   end;
   dtRectangle: Rectangle(TopLeft.X, TopLeft.Y, BottomRight.X, BottomRight.Y);
   dtSelect:begin
.................
         end;//dtSelect
         dtEllipse : ...........//some code
   dtRoundRect: ...........//some code
  dtEmptyEllypse:........//some code
  dtArrow:.........//some code
//etc, etc, etc
end;

I would sincerely appreciate if somebody could help me with the SELECT/Drag&Drop
part!
I also can be found at a...@crinsoft.ro

1.  You need to have a rectangle selection tool that just
shows the outline of a rectangle.  The article
"How to Draw Marching Ants" by Robert Vivrette is an
excellent way to draw this rectangle (and appears to be
what PSP is doing):
www.undu.com/DN960901/00000008.htm

You will want to make an in-memory TBitmap
"background" copy of the whole image with the
selected rectangled filled with black (or whatever
color you want).

2.  Once this selection rectangle is in place, a MouseDown
followed by a MouseMove will result in you drawing
the selected area on a copy of the "background"
and redisplaying the result.

___
efg

Earl F. Glynn     E-Mail:  EarlGl...@att.net
Overland Park, KS  USA

efg's Computer Lab:  http://www.efg2.com/Lab