DR2D — IFF Drawing 2D — is the Amiga's structured, or vector, drawing
format, and the one its desktop-publishing programs agreed to share. Drawings use the
.dr2d extension.
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Developer | Taliesin, Inc. (later renamed Stylus, Inc.) |
| Spec credited to | Ross Cunniff and John Orr; published by Commodore in AmigaMail Volume 2 |
| Native application | ProVector (Taliesin / Stylus) |
| Also adopted by | Art Expression (Soft-Logik); Professional Draw (Gold Disk) |
| Working era | Early-to-mid 1990s — ProVector 2.1 was shipping by October 1993, and ProVector 3 was covered in Amiga Format issue 58, April 1994 |
| Extension | .dr2d |
Taliesin, Inc. designed DR2D as the native save format for ProVector, its structured drawing package — one of the Amiga's most-used vector graphics tools, with an optional bitmap-tracing add-on called StylusTracer. Rather than leave it a private format, Commodore published the spec in AmigaMail Volume 2, shipped as part of the Amiga Developer CD, and the document itself named Saxon Industries and Soft-Logik Publishing as vendors "planning to support this new FORM" — a deliberate push to make DR2D the Amiga's one shared vector interchange standard rather than force every drawing program to speak a rival's private format. Soft-Logik's own Art Expression followed through, and so did Gold Disk's Professional Draw, alongside PageStream.
DR2D never spread beyond that small circle of Amiga desktop-publishing tools, and it did not survive the platform's decline — no dedicated modern conversion tool exists for it, and its only remaining documentation is the AmigaOS Documentation Wiki's mirror of the original spec.
Paintapp opens a DR2D drawing as an artboard of editable vector layers: filled and stroked shapes, straight and curved, with the drawing's color palette, stroke widths, dash patterns and join styles, and its own layers and their visibility.
A handful of DR2D features are not read, and in every case for the same reason: no file using them is known to exist, so there is nothing to check an implementation against. Paintapp says so when you open a drawing rather than guessing at what was meant.
| Feature | Result |
|---|---|
| Placed bitmaps | Not shown. DR2D never stored the pixels — a drawing holds only the path to a separate image file on the Amiga it was made on, which no longer travels with it. |
| Text, and text along a path | Not drawn |
| Object grouping | Not applied; shapes open in drawing order |
| Pattern fills | Not drawn; the shape opens unfilled |
| Arrowheads | Not drawn |
| References to external objects | Not resolved |
DR2D artwork is scarce. Aminet has one known collection: 44 clip-art drawings converted from EPS with ProVector in 1993. It is likely the main surviving public source of DR2D files and is what Paintapp support is tested against.