Absolute Brush and Differed Brush

[Joe]

Hey Brian, or anyone else, can you tell me the difference between the absolute brush, and the differed brush?  I can't see anything different between them in the Picture Editor.

[Brian Provinciano]

There isn't really much of a difference on the user's end (no PUN intended )

If you are drawing a lot of dots or whatever with the tool, it's better to use the difference brush, as your picture file will be a lot smaller. However, in this day and age of mainstream 120GB hard drives, a few bytes here and there aren't going to make a difference.

The difference brush doesn't allow you to draw at 0,0 then 319,189, for example, due to it's ability to make smaller files. It uses an eight bit difference from the last position, so you can only draw within about 127 pixels of the last plot. You could however, do something like 0,0 then 127, 127 then 256,189 then 319,189.

[Steven Melenchuk]

Just a quick related note:

The difference between Line and Short Line is exactly the same as between Absolute and Difference pens. Tiny Line saves even more space.

Some more statistics:
The first coordinate for any of these will use 3 bytes. Line and Absolute Pen will continue to use 3 bytes for all further coordinates.
Short Line and Difference Pen will use 2 bytes for further coordinates.
Tiny Line uses only 1 byte per pair of further coordinates.

So, use the shorter lines whenever you can!

PS - Brian, if I've made a mistake here somewhere, feel free to correct it.