However for displaying data, it has long lacked a few essential features the absense of which merely demonstrates how things are ruined by the involvement of large corporations and powerless standards organizations.
So I went ahead and added several features which I wanted, not only for the future word processor variant of Beest, but also for the web browser and especially for the I/O library (beestlib). Here I shall try to list them all for you.
There are several subtags which deal with drawing. They are: PIXEL, LINE, HLINE, VLINE, LINEREL, RECT, FILLEDRECT, and TEXT. Two additional tags are not implemented: OVAL and FILLEDOVAL. Each of these takes a foreground color parameter (COLOR) and a list of vectors (VECTORS), which in the case of PIXEL supplies only one vector. TEXT takes several parameters but will eventually accept an inline style instead.
Compression is fully supported, in that firstly all tags except DRAW and the unimplemented oval-drawing tags have shortened equivalents; secondly, so do parameter names; and thirdly the vectors list can be compressed using a scheme that I developed which yields 30 to 50 percent compression by using 6 bits of each ASCII character to carry coordinate information.
For more information I refer you to the comments in group.c.
To review 4.0 usage, the TYPE parameter allows you specify the kind of counting system to be used. A value of "1" indicates arabic counting, an "a" means lower-case letters, an "A" means upper-case letters, an "i" means lower-case Roman numerals, and an "I" means upper-case Roman numerals.
Each type except arabic is limited to a specific range of START values as follows: letters are 1..26, Roman is 1..25 (it quickly becomes too wide is the reason). If your START value falls outside, it is brought in. In future I shall add three more types: 2, 8, and x meaning binary, octal and hexadecimal.
The LI tag in 4.0 supports a TYPE value which can be any of "1", "a", "A", "i", "I", "DISC", "CIRCLE", or "SQUARE". All of these are supported, but the last three are all drawn as a small square since I haven't got a routine yet to draw a circle.