Welcome to Fractal Top

Welcome to Fractal Top. Fractal Top was originally written in Java 1.0, about 30 years ago. I wrote it because I was interested in fractals, the Mandelbrot Set in particular. There was no support for picture files that I know of, so I wrote my own GIF coder and decoder and a TIFF encoder. I was confined to a palette of 255 colors for the area around the fractals and one color, black, for the fractal itself. I wanted to be able to draw large pictures so the ability to draw a fractal in tiles that then can be assembled into one picture was an early feature of Fractal Top, or JavaQuat as I called for the first few years.

Various features have been added over the years:

• When a fractal picture is saved the arguments for drawing it are saved within the picture file. That way when the picture is opened in Fractal Top you can box a portion of it with the mouse and zoom in on the boxed details, zoom out, recenter, ect.
• The ability to insert a picture into the Complex Plane and when a point's orbit hits it the corresponding pixel of the picture is returned in the fractal image, just for fun.
• The ability to zoom into a fractal as far as you want using extended precision floating point numbers.
• Various drawing speed improvements: My own Java extended precision fractional number representation that is about 3 to 4 times faster than Java's BigDecimal class, using all the processors on you computer to draw in parallel, compiled extended precision code for the various fractals in the "Loops" menu.
• The ability to use more than 256 colors and save and read fractal drawings in PNG format, still with the drawing arguments saved in the fractal PNG file.
• The ability to trace the orbit of a point within a drawn fractal and have it displayed in another window where one can later zoom in to see more detail of the orbit.
• Orbit attractor analysis to give you a count of the attractors for an orbit and list what they are. If the orbit's maximum length prevents certainty on the attractors a pretty good guess is made and labeled as such. In that case you can increase the limit on the orbit length and try again.
• A new color editor for creating, editing, saving, reading color palettes.
• The ability to extract colors from a photo and get a smoothly changing color palette from the colors in the photo, suitable for coloring fractal drawings.

Fractal Top is available for downloading. I've created installers for the computers I have access to: Windows 11, Mac with Intel chip, Mac with Apple chip. You can also download the JAR file, though the compiled code library won't be available and so you'll lose a 4X speed increase on deep zooms.

Today is Aug. 10, 2026. The downloads page is still in the works. Give me a few days to get it completed

Galleries Click on a picture below to see more.
This is the 20 year old content.
Gallery 1	Gallery 2	Gallery 3
Gallery 4	Animated Fractals	Rachel's Proofs

If you are interested in having a fractal you can frame and hang on the wall, you will have to look elsewhere for a while. The free software that will provided here has been used to create fractals 4 by 8 feet at 300 pixels per inch and you can make them any size you like.

Comments, suggestions, and bug reports are all very welcome. I enjoy hearing from fractal enthusiasts.
gmail me at garrlystad at gmail point com

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