svermeulen%Janus.MRC.AdhocNet.CA@UNCAEDU.BITNET (Steve Vermeulen) (09/12/88)
>From: Steve Meloche <steve@dcdwest.uucp> >Subject: Re: Amiga-->Mac graphics conv. First another example of what a waste of money AmigaWhorl Adds can be: >Yes, it can be done, but there are some holes left in the process. There is >nothing as yet (that I have seen) that deals with HAM (or halfbright) IFF >pictures. With all other Amiga graphics modes, however, the PD GIF converters Express Paint (available since September 1987) does work in Extra Half Brite (EHB) mode if you want it. Steve then relates the contorted efforts he went through to get Pagesetter output on a laserwriter: >pics on the Apple Laserwriters here at work. As of yet, the most horrendous >path I have had to put my data through is the following: >1. Upon finishing a document in Pagesetter, save it. >2. Use supplied program to convert Pagesetter document to IFF picture. The > resulting picture is now in super overscan (7 x 8 1/2" page -> 820 pixels > wide) which cannot be viewed by any program I own without crashing the > machine. Isn't there a PD IFF viewer that uses a scrolling superbitmap? I tried this once, could not get the program to produce a complete image (the first 32K of the bitmap was ok but was garbage after that), so I used CMD to redirect printer output, wrote a program called HP2IFF (posted here with source a couple of months back) to convert the graphics dump data into an IFF picture (this was done at 300DPI). And used VPage (an IFF to PostScript conversion tool, which handles placement of several IFF pics on one page) to convert the IFF file to PostScript. >3. Use NEWZAP to change the colors (for some reason the Pagesetter IFF conver- > sion program doesn't save in black and white). >4. Use IFFGIF to convert to GIF format (which shrinks the file, too!) >5. uuencode the file and upload it to the vax at work with VT100. >6. uudecode it on the vax and convert it to postscript with the conversion I used zoo to compress the resulting 2Meg file to about 50K and modemed it to a SUN, where it was unZooed and squirted out to the QMS-800+... > program from the net, which I had to specially modify to keep the correct > aspect ratio. >7. Print the resulting picture (now over 1 MEGABYTE - AACK!) on the laser > writer with a locally written program, and TA-DA! a spiffy looking > document with crisp, beautiful blocky Amiga letters. It was worth the effort but... >If I could get CLAZ to work (on anything!) I could possibly reduce these steps, >but I can't. Express Paint also has the capability to output pictures in PostScript image format (since 2.0) so you just load the IFF file into Express Paint and select PostScript mode for printing. It will also allow you to print to a file in case you don't have an onsite laser printer. This sort of "grab the output from A and manipulate it in B, C..." (perhaps we should call this MultiProgramming :-) is going to get more common and easier when ExP 3.0 and CLtd's LaserXpress become available. In the preferences printer driver CLtd supplies there is a way of redirecting the BITMAPPED output of any thing that prints (even a plain "copy file to prt:") directly into Express Paint for further editing before printing... Stephen Vermeulen Author: Express Paint Chairman: AMUC.