richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) (10/23/87)
In article <619@louie.udel.EDU> rminnich@udel.EDU (Ron Minnich) writes: >In article <2490@dciem.UUCP> king@dciem.UUCP (Stephen King) writes: >>In article <605@louie.udel.EDU> rminnich@udel.EDU (Ron Minnich) writes: >>>other hand, it was $15 and it works. Sure the output looks like hell >>>but DPaint is awful too and it costs a lot more. Which led me to >> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >>I am surprised by this statement. I think DPaint is GREAT! What are you >>comparing it to? >> >>>My wife refused to countenance any money spent on another Amiga >>>program- she used DPaint too until we realized we could not print. >> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Huh ? Why can't you print ? > Look, let's just say for the moment that i am joe typical amiga >user. Or maybe what C= would like to be typical. I plunk my $90 >down for DPaint, and what do i get? >1) A program that takes over 2 minutes to start up- because of the > idiotic encoding There are ways around this. >2) a program that basically eats my amiga-unless i get > 512K It's a BIG program. It does lots of stuff. It even overlays. TNSTAAFL. >3) a program that, admittedly, is a pretty fantastic paint program, BUT ... You bet it is. Check out what the big boys use at the next SIGGRAPH meeting, there aint that much of a difference, except they have more colors. And *those* packages are the price of a house or a Countach. >4) i cannot make copies of those pictures! What are you talking about ? > Or I do the best i can, > do figures for an article, send the article out, and get lambasted > by the reviewers for the quality of the pictures (which is > really annoying). I don't understand. Dpaint, you said, is a great program, but they don't like your pictures. What don't they like ? Your artistry or your printer ? Either way it's not Dpaint's fault, now, is it ? > It is a great paint program. From almost every other standpoint >it is a complete write-off. I do not much care if it is wonderful >if i cannot (after a LOT of trying) get decent b/w output. >Maybe it is partly C= fault, i do not know. I really had to wonder, >though, if EA ever even tried to print on a 'just folks' printer. >I could not believe that they could ship a product whose printed >output looked so bad. I havn't noticed printed output looking bad ? What is your setup ? >Compare this to MacPaint Eeeeeuuuuchh. > (sorry!). So you should be. > you can >still go to talks and read articles that have figures done under >MacPaint in them PRINTED ON AN IMAGEWRITER; they look OK. Are you saying that a Dpaint picture printed on an IMAGEWRITER look worse than equivilent MacPaint pictures printed on the same printer ? Could you elaborate ? If you want to show up the mac folks, take screen shots with slide film, and do a (color) slide show. Beats the **** out of Imagewriter output. And at $3 to develop a roll of film, the price is right, too. >>Before getting a bargain on a Canon PJ-1080 color ink-jet printer, > Which i cannot afford ... $699 new, $199 close-out, advertised in BYTE magazine. >>They were no screaming hell, but they were hard copy > in my opinion, barely. Like i say, what is the point of >the world's best paint program if you cannot print it? I guess I've been lucky. My Dpaint pictures seem to come out great on the PostScript Laser Printer I have, seem to look great on the Polaroid Palette setup, look great on the $199 Canon, and even look great in slides taken by shooting the monitor with a 35 mm camera. [...spreadsheet stuph deleted...] >I should add that i am a victim of Lattice 3.03, You have my heartfelt sympathies. I used this turkey for about a week, was thouroughly disgusted, threw my hands up in the air, babbled something like "this is as bad as the PC 'C' compiler they make me use at work" and found a better compiler. Can you say "cat with no tail" ? Can you say "race of dead South/Central American indians" ? I've been happy ever since. > Anyway, the tone of my letter was meant to really say: > NICE WORK C= Hear hear. >Heck, the 500 weighs less >than a 3277 keyboard ... So do most boat anchors and some Subaru's. >ron (rminnich@udel.edu) -- Richard J. Sexton INTERNET: richard@gryphon.CTS.COM UUCP: {hplabs!hp-sdd, sdcsvax, ihnp4, nosc}!crash!gryphon!richard "It's too dark to put the keys in my ignition..."
rminnich@udel.EDU (Ron Minnich) (10/23/87)
In article <2020@gryphon.CTS.COM> richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) writes: > >Huh ? Why can't you print ? > >>1) A program that takes over 2 minutes to start up- because of the >> idiotic encoding > >There are ways around this. Oh, yes, go spend $30 on copy un-protector. Why should a customer have to do this? >>4) i cannot make copies of those pictures! > >What are you talking about ? > >> Or I do the best i can, >> do figures for an article, send the article out, and get lambasted >> by the reviewers for the quality of the pictures (which is >> really annoying). > >I don't understand. Dpaint, you said, is a great program, but they >don't like your pictures. What don't they like ? Your artistry or >your printer ? Either way it's not Dpaint's fault, now, is it ? OK, i will state this simply, although it has been gone over by many other people here before. Go into dpaint. draw a triangle. looks like triangle. Print it. Has one pixel line missing, or is distorted in some other way. Type 'this is a test' in any font. print it. The same letters in the same line look slightly different. Spend a lot of time adjusting preferences. read all the magazines to see what other people did. Take their 'best preferences' numbers, set them up, look at the printed picture, go 'yuck', put dpaint on the shelf and go back to tpic/latex. What the reviewer's do not like is the lousy quality of the printed output, and they said so. Not what i drew. What dpaint printed. I see it as the responsibility of EA to ship a program that prints well. Dpaint does not. Yes, in my opinion, IT IS DPAINTS fault. i drop money on a paint program, it better be able to print. I do not have time to cover up for its problems. >I havn't noticed printed output looking bad ? What is your setup ? See the above. If you can print 'this is a test', and have all the cross-bars on the T's exactly the same width/height, then you are doing better than i. I have either a star 10 or a jx80, depending on location. I also have CLAZ. no real improvement. >Are you saying that a Dpaint picture printed on an IMAGEWRITER >look worse than equivilent MacPaint pictures printed on the >same printer ? Could you elaborate ? I have not been able to try imagewriter. I am saying that dpaint on 1) laserwriter 2) jx80 3) star 10 does not look as good as macpaint+imagewriter. >If you want to show up the mac folks, take screen shots with slide >film, and do a (color) slide show. Beats the **** out of Imagewriter >output. And at $3 to develop a roll of film, the price is right, too. You can not do a slide show in Soft. Prac. and Exp. >>>Before getting a bargain on a Canon PJ-1080 color ink-jet printer, >> Which i cannot afford ... >$699 new, $199 close-out, advertised in BYTE magazine. WHICH I CANNOT AFFORD. anyway, i now use 'mcad', on fish disk 74. Very nice product, it drives my hp 6-color plotter, and it is object-oriented. I am going to send the guy his $20 and get source. -- ron (rminnich@udel.edu)
ralph@mit-atrp.UUCP (Ralph L. Vinciguerra) (10/26/87)
Getting good printed output from Dpaint: Don't let DPAINT print for you, it uses the wrong control codes to setup the printer driver. It's far more interested in keeping the aspect ratio correct than rendering your image. I typically print out my dpaint images with a program called "screendump" which C Scheppner of CBM posted here along time ago. It lets you set all the important printer parameters and then grabs the highest screen and prints it. I routinely print out 640 by 400 pixel images as EXACTLY 640x400 dot images. I blame Dpaint for not giving me direct control, but I have gotten good output by using other better tools.
richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) (10/27/87)
In article <626@louie.udel.EDU> rminnich@udel.EDU (Ron Minnich) writes: > Go into dpaint. draw a triangle. looks like triangle. >Print it. Has one pixel line missing, or is distorted in some >other way. Type 'this is a test' in any font. print it. >The same letters in the same line look slightly different. >Spend a lot of time adjusting preferences. read all the magazines >to see what other people did. Take their 'best preferences' numbers, >set them up, look at the printed picture, go 'yuck', put >dpaint on the shelf and go back to tpic/latex. Ah! So thats what you're on about. Yes. this is a problem. In Dpaint I there was no way to control the printer output. It just scaled for what IT thought was right. Now in dpaint II, there is control that the user can exercise over the beastie. If you set the page size, it will have an effect on the scaling, and if you pick a good one, you just might get a decent mapping from screen pixels to printer pixels. For example for the Canon, I use 640 by 770 with margins set at 5 and 89 to get 1 screen pixel to map to 1 printer pixel. To determine this, I just printed diagonal lines, changed the screen size, and then tried to eliminate all the artifacts. Eventually I got it right. > What the reviewer's do not like is the lousy quality of the >printed output, and they said so. Not what i drew. What dpaint >printed. I see it as the responsibility of EA to ship a >program that prints well. Dpaint does not. Yes, in my opinion, >IT IS DPAINTS fault. Hey, its dPAINT. It paints. You want to print ? go buy dPRINT. Just kidding, put the ax down, eugene. Yes, it would have been nice of EA or C= or somebody to point out to us exactly how the printer interface works, and what we had to do to print without any artifacts of pixel replication. >>If you want to show up the mac folks, take screen shots with slide >>film, and do a (color) slide show. Beats the **** out of Imagewriter >>output. And at $3 to develop a roll of film, the price is right, too. >You can not do a slide show in Soft. Prac. and Exp. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ What is this ? >anyway, i now use 'mcad', on fish disk 74. Very nice product, >it drives my hp 6-color plotter, and it is object-oriented. >I am going to send the guy his $20 and get source. Perhaps you wanted an object based DRAWING program rather than a pixel based PAINT program frojm the start ? >ron (rminnich@udel.edu) -- Richard J. Sexton INTERNET: richard@gryphon.CTS.COM UUCP: {hplabs!hp-sdd, sdcsvax, ihnp4, nosc}!crash!gryphon!richard "It's too dark to put the keys in my ignition..."
dca@toylnd.UUCP (David C. Albrecht) (10/31/87)
> >You can not do a slide show in Soft. Prac. and Exp. > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > What is this ? > Software Practice and Experience. It's an ACM Journal and generally considered one of the better ones. David Albrecht
page@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) (11/10/87)
SPE isn't an ACM journal.
..Bob
--
Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept. page@ulowell.{uucp,edu,csnet} dca@toylnd.UUCP (11/23/87)
> SPE isn't an ACM journal.
I stand corrected. And rightly so.
David Albrecht