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  1. Fractal-Top 5.1.1 - Aug. 2026, the latest. The .jar files here were compiled with Eclipse Adaptium 26.0.1 Java. I like and use IBM's Semeru Java also. All the different versions of Java are compatible but there are strings attached to Oracle's version for other than personal use, which is very much contrary to the spirit in which Java was created.      This is the first time that Fractal Top has all the features I wanted it to have and none of the bugs I didn't want it to have. (Bugs have been kept to a minimum throughout the development of Fractal Top.)
         Here is a list of what I think of as the primary features of Fractal Top:
    • Fractal Top will let you zoom in to details in a fractal as far as you want. It draws with Java's "double precision" floating point numbers when those will do the job and then transitions to extended precision numbers when needed.
    • Fractal Top uses a palette of colors of any size you like. The built in color editor lets you choose the number and order of the colors used to color the fractal picture. It also lets you extract the colors from a photo and creates a palette with them.
    • When you save a fractal picture, the parameters used to draw the picture are invisibly saved within the picture. This allows Fractal Top to read in a picture you save and zoom in or out, as if you had just drawn the picture.
    • Fractals are defined by a sequence of points that ore generated for every point in the picture. Fractal Top will mark the sequence, or a portion of it, in another fractal drawing window. The flags persist in that window until you erase them. This allows you to zoom in on a cluster of points to look at them more closely.
    • Points in the picture that are actually part of the fractal have sequences that eventually cycle through the same values. These points are called "attractors" and the sequence is referred to as the "orbit". Fractal Top let you know how many attractors there are and list them for you if you ask it too. For parts of a fractal found in a deep zoom this may take some time so, by default, that feature is not turned on.
    • Fractal Top makes it easy to draw very large fractal pictures. You can choose to draw the picture in tiles that can later be assembled into a final picture. This way, if there is a problem part way through the drawing you don't lose your work and can start drawing again with the next tile of the picture.
    • Fractal Top gives you an idea of what the whole picture looks like before it is all drawn. It first draws the first, last, and every 8th line in between. It next draws the lines midway inbetween so you have every 4th line. Then it's every 2nd line. And then it fills in the remaining half of the lines. At any point the drawing can be paused, a rectangle in the picture marked, and a zoomed in drawing begun.
    • For added speed, Fractal Top uses compiled C++ code for extended precision arithmetic, on deeep zooms. If, for some reason a fractal doesn't is not included in the compiled C++ library that comes with Fractal Top, Java code that is 3 to 4 times as fast as Java's BigDecimal class is used.

    Various Fractal-Top 5.0.6 downloads:


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